European court finds Italy violated the right to life of Naples residents living in toxic dump area
FILE -Outside view March 22, 2011 of the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France. (AP Photo/Christian Lutz, File)
ROME (AP) — A European court on Thursday said Italy violated the right to life of those living in a toxic-waste polluted area around Naples, in a scathing ruling that validated a generation of residents’ complaints that mafia dumping and burning of waste had led to increased rates of cancer and other ailments.
The binding judgement from the European Court of Human Rights ordered the Italian government to develop a comprehensive strategy to address and monitor the contamination of the Tierra dei Fuoci, or Land of Fires, an area of 90 municipalities around Caserta and Naples which is home for around 2.9 million people.
The court found that Italian authorities had known about the pollution problem, blamed on mafia clans called Camorra that control waste disposal, since 1988 but failed to address it and had not done what was necessary to protect residents’ lives.
The Strasbourg-based court gave the government two years to also set up an information platform so that residents have access to data about the pollution of their lands and the verified health risks associated with living there.
Residents have long complained about adverse health effects from the dumping, which poisoned underground wells used to irrigate the farmland that provides vegetables for much of Italy’s center and south. Over the years, police have sequestered dozens of fields because their irrigation wells contained high levels of lead, arsenic and the industrial solvent tetrachloride.
Authorities say the contamination is due to the Camorra’s multibillion-dollar racket of disposing toxic waste, mainly from industries in Italy’s wealthy north that ask no questions about where the garbage goes as long as it’s taken off their hands — for a fraction of the cost of legal disposal. Over the years, Camorra turncoats revealed how the racket works, directing police to specific sites where toxic garbage was dumped, buried or burned.
The court found that Italian authorities had ordered seven different parliamentary commissions of inquiry, but a chaotic public administration system had failed to address the pollution systematically and had not done what was necessary to protect residents’ lives.
“Overall, the Court found that the Italian authorities had not approached the Terra dei Fuochi problem with the diligence warranted by the seriousness of the situation,” the ruling said. “The Italian State had not done all that was required of it to protect the applicants’ lives.”
Italy’s government, in its arguments to the court, had pointed to seven environmental-related convictions and numerous initiatives to investigate health problems. But the court blasted the Italian government’s recourse to state secrecy and overall delays in responding to the problem.
“Progress had been glacial in assessing the pollution impact when expedition had been necessary,” according to a summary of the ruling, which noted a “generalised problem of coordination and attribution of responsibilities in Campania regarding decontamination” such that “it was impossible to get an overall sense of where had yet to be decontaminated.”
The court accepted the residents’ assertions that there was a “sufficiently serious, genuine and ascertainable” risk to life, which could be qualified as “imminent.”
The Rev. Maurizio Patriciello, who has long ministered to families affected by the contamination, said the ruling vindicated their decades-long battle.
“How much slander we had to endure; how many threats; how much mockery; how many insults,” he said in a social media post. “We went ahead. Convinced. We saw with our own eyes the destruction of our lands and our lives.”
He offered a prayer as well for all those who had died from cancer during their legal battle, including his own brothers, a sister-in-law and nephew. “To the many, many children, teens, young parents whom cancer has torn apart and killed.”
In one of the latest inquests, a parliament-mandated health survey in 2016 confirmed higher-than-normal incidents of death and cancer among residents and said it was “critical” to address the rates of babies being hospitalized in the first year of life for “excessive” instances of tumors, especially brain tumors.
The report, which updated an initial one in 2014, blamed the higher-than-usual rates on “ascertained or suspected exposure to a combination of environmental contaminants that can be emitted or released from illegal hazardous waste dump sites and/or the uncontrolled burning of both urban and hazardous waste.”
The case was brought to the European Court of Human Rights by 41 people who live in Caserta or Naples provinces and five local organizations.