โ Scribed by Hans-W. Micklitz
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
This paper gives an account of the dangers to human health arising from PCP and lindane based wood preservatives, how the issue arose in Germany, and how those injured by wood preservatives took the initiative to organize themselves in order to defend their interests against the chemical industry. The latter played down the risks, and in so doing benefitted from the German public authorities' sustained reluctance to tackle the problem of a possible link between injuries and the hazardous wood preservatives. Press and media played a key role in the process of creating public awareness of the risks resulting from wood preservatives.
Lawyers have become involved in helping to pinpoint responsibility: Have consumers been used as guinea pigs for the chemical industry, and has the chemical industry really done all it can to prevent people from being endangered and injured? Some twenty actions have been brought before the courts, actions which have been accompanied by a growing public awareness. Legal and judicial solutions are not yet in sight. The jurisprudence is far from settled. The paper aims at describing and analyzing the strategies of the injured and the counter attacks of industry, at elaborating the role of the judiciary in a field where legal arguments are inseparably linked to political decisions, and finally at setting out the cornerstones of the legal debate. It might well be that the solution will be found on the political floor. The German civil courts do not seem to be willing to take over the responsibility and to condemn the German chemical industry for compensation. The solution might derive from the Frankfurt public prosecutor engagement which has been invoked by several thousand injured people. The public prosecutor has now accused those responsible in the chemical industry, thereby possibly preparing the ground for a joint commitment of the industry and the German government, for which the Thalidomide catastrophe might serve as a precedent.
In D e c e m b e r 1982, an article on wood preservatives was published in the G e r m a n magazine "Stern" (Spill, 1982). It laid b l a m e on these preparations for causing illness a m o n g people who had used them widely for protective and decorative purposes in their homes. Two basic chemical substances used in wood preservatives were heavily criticised in the seventies: P e n t a c h l o r o p h e n o l (PCP) as a fungicide and lindane as an insecticide. E v e n m o r e significantly, wood preservatives were said to contain d i b e n z o f u r a n e and dioxine including the poison T C D D that was involved in the Seveso disaster. Elvira Spill's article directed the public's attention to the widespread use of hazardous wood preservatives.
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