INDIA: Indian environmentalists are locked in a standoff with Paris to prevent a decommissioned, asbestos-laden French aircraft carrier from entering a ship-breaking yard in western Gujarat state.
Earlier this week India's supreme court banned the Clemenceau from entering the country's waters before February 13th, when a ruling is due on whether it can be scrapped at the Alang ship-breaking yard following charges by local and global environmental groups that the asbestos on board threatens the ship-breakers' health.
The carrier has been the focus of international controversy for some years concerning where it could be decontaminated.
Environmentalists said countries like Greece and Turkey had already refused permission for the warship to be dismantled in their breakers' yards.
They accused the French of "enticing" Alang one of the world's largest ship-breaking yards, into performing the hazardous task by luring them with the 20,000 tons of steel that can be recovered from the hulk.
Dismantling the ship also ensures thousands of jobs for locals who fear it may be diverted to rival wreckers in neighbouring Bangladesh or China.
The French government claims the vessel is carrying 45 tons of asbestos insulation, but the firm that helped partially decontaminate it before the trip says the amount is between 500 and 1,000 tons.
Greenpeace charges that the 27,000-ton carrier is full, not only of deadly asbestos, but equally lethal lead, mercury and other toxic chemicals. Greenpeace has been fighting for months to block the ship's transfer and also charges France with breaching the 1989 Basel Convention that bans the export of potentially hazardous waste.
The Clemenceau - the former pride of the French navy - left the Mediterranean port of Toulon on December 31st and is being towed to India after being delayed for three days before being permitted into the Suez Canal.
But at the weekend Egypt said it faced no environmental threat from the warship's passage through the canal and gave it permission to proceed.
Meanwhile, an Indian two-judge supreme court bench said it would decide on February 13th whether the Clemenceau could enter Alang.
A monitoring panel, which reports to the supreme court, had previously recommended in its interim report that the vessel should not be allowed to enter Indian territorial waters because of the toxic waste it carried.
"We will await the monitoring committee's report," judge Arijit Pasayal said, adding in the meantime that the Clemenceau should stay outside India's exclusive economic zone, 350km offshore.
Three of the country's largest trade unions - two of them affiliated to communist parties that form part of the governing federal administration - have also written to the Indian prime minister, asking him to stop the warship from being towed to Alang until it is cleared of toxic waste on board.
"The warship is a threat to the workers' health and the environment," the trade unions said in their letter to prime minister Manmohan Singh.