French court dismisses US Agent Orange case – JURIST

The Paris Court of Appeal rejected an appeal by Tran To Nga to prosecute Monsanto and fourteen other agrochemical companies for their role in producing Agent Orange for the US armed forces, arguing legal immunity from prosecution because they were working on behalf of a sovereign government.

Agent Orange is a mixture of equal parts of the two herbicides 2,4,5-T and 2,4-D, which contain the highly toxic TCDD/dioxin, which causes serious health problems and deformities on contact with the agent, especially in children. The product was invented in the USA in the 1940s and was used in industrial agriculture and to control plant growth near infrastructure sites. Between 1961 and 1971, the US military carried out almost 20,000 sorties, dropping around 50 million litres of Agent Orange containing 366 kg of TCDD/dioxin on up to 26,000 villages in an area affecting around 4.8 million people. Agent Orange was sprayed at concentrations up to 20 times the manufacturer's recommended concentration for killing plants.

Ms. Nga, who was born in the southern province of Soc Trang, was exposed to dioxin during the Vietnam War. She claimed that medical tests showed that the concentration of dioxin in her blood was higher than the prescribed limit and that she suffered from five of the 17 diseases recognized by the United States as being caused by Agent Orange. She also claimed that all of her children suffered from heart and bone defects and that her first child died of a congenital heart defect at the age of 17 months.

Hers is one of the few cases where, under a law protecting French citizens from harm from another country, there is legal grounds to file Agent Orange-related lawsuits because she is a French citizen, lives in France, and was herself a victim of Agent Orange/dioxin. In 2013, the Evry court granted Ms. Nga permission to file suit against the chemical companies that supplied the U.S. military with herbicides. It ruled in 2021 that the lawsuit was inadmissible because the companies enjoy legal immunity. The Paris Court of Appeal upheld that earlier decision.

In a press statement, Foreign Ministry spokesman Pham Thu Hang said:

We have recently received information on this matter. Vietnam regrets the ruling of the Paris Court of Appeal and has repeatedly expressed its position on this matter. Although the war has ended, its serious consequences continue to have a profound impact on our country and our people, including the long-term and serious effects of AO/dioxin. Vietnam strongly supports the victims of AO/dioxin and calls on the chemical companies that produced and supplied the poison to the United States during the Vietnam War, which caused suffering to millions of Vietnamese, to take responsibility for the damage.

Nga immediately announced that he would appeal to the Court of Cassation, France's highest court. In a press release, Nga's lawyers William Bourdon and Bertrand Repolt described the verdict as “contradictory to the modernity of the law and to international and European law.”