Examination of Witnesses (Questions 100-103)
14 JULY 2004
MR TONY
JUNIPER, MR
MIKE CHILDS
AND MR
PHIL MICHAELS
Q100 Mr Lepper: It is not already a right
that is necessarily available?
Mr Juniper: That is right and
this is why the corporate responsibility coalition, which is a
very broad coalition, including not only environmental groups
but church groups, unions, human rights groups and development
organisations have been working together to press this point because
this is something that goes way beyond the environmental sphere,
obviously.
Q101 Mr Lepper: I do understand the point
that you made earlier about the scepticism that you had about,
for instance, BP overseeing dismantling in other countries, and
I take the general point that you are making there, without commenting
on the expertise of BP as a company. Are you aware of any international
body which one could see as overseeing these kinds of activities
in other countries in a way that would be internationally acceptable?
Mr Juniper: I do not know of any.
Our colleagues from Greenpeace might have some reflections on
this because they have followed this also.
Q102 Alan Simpson: Tony, I wanted to
follow David's line and to ask does the IMO figure in this? Because
in a lot of the discussions that we have been having many of the
discussions pass beyond the remit of national governments into
a framework that says the IMO has to be a really serious and central
player in this, just because of the ease of shipping companies
to play pass the parcel with the ownership of vessels. The other
part of that is to ask is it helpful for us to try to structure
some of those discussions at an international level in ways that
separate off the recycling of ships? We are constantly told that
it is not like dumping a car, that an end of life ship has considerable
recycling value, particularly in the developing world where the
recycled parts will virtually all go into other uses, and treating
that quite separate from what remains as toxic waste to those
ships?
Mr Childs: I think in the first
part of the question you are absolutely right, of course, we do
need to have some international agreement around this area and
we do need to have some international regulatory framework. I
note that the Committee was questioning BP and P&O recently,
where there was a voluntary agreement, but a seeming reluctance
for seeing a voluntary agreement becoming a regulatory agreement,
and clearly there is ship scrapping happening in appalling conditions
at the moment, so voluntary agreement does not seem to be the
most effective remedy. So I do think we need a regulatory regime.
Whether that is within the International Maritime Organisation
or whether it is under the aegis of the United Nations in a new
treaty or agreement under the United Nations, and I think the
latter for us brings some democratic credibility there. We do
definitely need that. In terms of treating waste differently,
whether it is for recycling or for disposal, of course that is
where we are at now. The UK would not have accepted these ships
if they were just for disposal, if there was not going to be recycling
involved in it; it would have been against EU law. A difficulty
we have of course is that ships do have lots of hazardous components
on them and the evidence that we have seen is that it is very
difficult if not impossible to strip all of those hazardous components
out because they are built into the ship. So in many ways they
are hazardous materials and we would like to see those kinds of
materials dealt with in a more regulatory regime that says countries
have to deal with their own waste. An example would be that computers
of course are exported for recycling overseas, and there was some
recent research done by the Environmental News Digest Journal,
which found that much of the computers being exported out of the
UK for recycling were not really being recycled and it was in
extremely poor conditions. So we need to have a tougher regulatory
oversight about waste going for recycling, which we are not dealing
with properly yet at the moment.
Mr Juniper: One thing that it
might be worth adding—and I know Mike knows something about
this—is the European Union's implementation of the Stockholm
Convention—this is the one for Persistent Organic Pollutants
(POPs)—which, as I understand it, will mean that if this
legislation goes through at the European Union level it will soon
mean that it will be illegal to import and export PCBs.
Mr Childs: Sort of, in that we
see that the spirit of the Stockholm Convention says that waste
that contains PCBs should not be transferred between countries
unless it is exported or imported, unless it is being imported
from a developing country where they do not have the facilities
to deal with those PCBs.
Mr Juniper: So that is a separate
international framework outside the Maritime unit.
Q103 Alan Simpson: Can I just come back
on this because that sounds all very neat if you are talking about
trade and dismantling between or by countries, but the point that
has consistently been made to us is that you do not have an end
of life vessel until it enters the mind of the last owner that
that is its last journey. So you do not have nation states having
that responsibility, and it is very easy to do what is the de
facto last journey; it then gets sold on to another owner,
it is not a nation state that owns it, and it then becomes illegal
for that third country—thirteenth country, it does not matter
what it is—to have then the residual responsibility. So
the dumping process gets palmed off anyway, and the issue that
we are struggling with is how do you hold people accountable when
there is not a nation state hold over the ownership of those vessels?
Mr Juniper: Which then brings
us back to the international frameworks and the role, for example,
of the IMO, and the difficulty we have right now in pursuing
any multilateral environmental discussions. Johannesburg, Kyoto
are kind of stalled and, because of the way in which international
politics is working right now—not even in just the environmental
world, WTO too—there are such difficult politics now operating
in the international institutions that it would be undoubtedly
years before any kind of agreement could be reached. To that extent
we would advocate that, yes, let us certainly pursue the international
routes, let us find some way of reaching international political
agreement, but, in the meantime, let us also look for the wins
we can make at home in terms of corporate accountability and a
policy framework that takes account of our own control over our
own ships, Royal Navy ones in the first instance.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed,
gentlemen. I think you have encapsulated well some of the dilemmas
that we are currently grappling with and you have brought some
very interesting perspectives to our consideration, particularly
your commentary on some of the American background to this, which
we found very interesting. I think we are already forming the
view that this is an immensely complex area, but we are grateful
to you for your contribution, both in terms of your oral evidence
and the very helpful paper you sent us and thank you very much
for coming before us.
Mr Juniper: Thank you very much,
Chairman, it is a great pleasure.
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