leaders of five organisations of the gas survivors of the 1984 Union Carbide disaster in Bhopal spoke here on Tuesday on an ambitious signature petition launched by their international supporters to force Dow Chemical, the new owner of Union Carbide, appear in the criminal proceedings on the disaster in the Bhopal District Court on July 13, 2016.
The petition, moved by the International Campaign for Justice in Bhopal, North America on Sunday, May 15 at the website of the White House calls on the US Department of Justice to serve a notice issued by the Bhopal District Court upon Dow Chemical to appear in the ongoing criminal proceedings in India.
According to the organisations, the petition will have to get one lakh signatures before June 15, 2016 to make the US government formally respond to the petition. They said that already 3500 persons have signed the petition. leaders of the organizations said that as a result of social media actions around the launch of the petition, Dow Chemical's CEO, Andrew liveris has had to make his twitter account private.
The organizations assert that the US Department of Justice is breaching a fifteen year old ‘Mutual legal Assistance Treaty’ between the U.S. and India by refusing to serve the four notices from the Bhopal District Court sent by the Indian Home Ministry.
The organisations said that their supporters in USA have garnered support for the petition from a number of US environmental and human rights organizations such as Greenpeace, Pesticides Action Network and Amnesty, and trade unions such as the AFl-CIO and other associations.
According to the Bhopal survivors' organisations, eminent US citizens including Gary Cohen, one of the ‘Champions of Change’ nominated by the US President in 2013, Martin Sheen, acclaimed Hollywood actor and activist and Noam Chomsky, Professor at MIT and world renowned academic have extended their support to the petition.