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O direito à informação Administrativa , não se restringe só à informação relativa ao Ambiente, mas a toda a actividade administrativa, de decisões tomadas há mais de um ano. Este direito reflecte o controlo particular da Administração. Tendo acento constitucional, no artigo 268º/2 da Constituição da Répública Portuguesa e também no Código de Procedimento Administrativo, artigos 61º a 64º, concretizando-se em diversas leis , nomeadamente na lei nº46/2007, de 24 de Agosto, que transpõe a Directiva 2003/98 CE.
Em França existe direito à informação embora um pouco limitado. Não existe um direito geral à informação em matéria de ambiente, mas podemos encontrar-lo consagrado em vários textos, em determinados sectores. Sendo um direito imprescíndivel a uma sociedade democrática,o essencial está regulado na lei de 17 de Julho de 1978 sobre a comunicação de documentos administrativos: "Sous réserve des dispositions de l'article 6 les documents administratifs sont de plein droit communicables aux personnes qui en font la demande, qu'ils émanent des administrations de l'Etat, des collectivités territoriales, des établissements publics ou des organismes, fussent-ils de droit privé, chargés de la gestion d'un service public" (art.2). As informações não contidas em documentos não estão no campo de aplicação da lei. Os documentos preparatórios não são comunicados antes do encerramento dos processos de decisão, dos quais são uma parte.Os documentos inacabados nem sequer figuram do rol de documentos comunicáveis. Nao obstante, as associações têm feito evoluir a jurisprudência e tem obtido resultados satisfatórios.
No Direito Brasileiro, a constituição Federal de 1988 trata do direito à informação no seu artigo 5º " ...é assegurado todos o acesso à informação e resguardado o sigilo da fonte, quando necesário ao exercício profissional" , "todos têm direito a receber dos órgãos públicos informações de seu interesse particular, ou de interesse colectivo ou geral, que serão prestadas no prazo da lei, sob pena de responsabilidade, ressalvadas aquelas cujo sigilo seja imprescíndivel à segurança da sociedade e do Estado". Ou seja todos têm direito à informação genericamente, mas quando esta provier de um um particular, este poderá não a fornecer devido ao sigilo profissional, todavia no que respeita aos órgãos públicos, estes têm obrigação de as fornecer, salvo nos casos exceptuados pelo artigo. Este direito não está só consagrado na constituição mas também em legislação ordinária, como por exemplo a Lei nº 6.938/81 (Lei da Política Nacional do Meio Ambiente) que estabelece que um dos instrumentos de defesa Pública Nacional do Meio Ambiente é o sistema de informações sobre o Meio Ambiente e a Lei 7.347/85 (Lei que trata da acção civil pública) que no seu artigo 8º refere que "...o interessado poderá recorrer às autoridades competentes as certidões e informações que julgar necessárias, a serem fornecidas no prazo de 15 dias." Fernando Paulo da Silva considera este principio como "príncipio auxiliar duma eficaz e efectiva tutela dos direitos fundamentais, designadamente em matéria de direitos económicos, sociais e culturais, como por exemplo o direito ao ambiente." Todavia este Direito à informação não é autónomo dependendo da conjugação com o direito de participação e do direito à transparência. A Lei nº 10.650/2003 prevê a obrigação dos órgãos públicos fornecerem mediante requerimento do interessado informaçãoes sobre acidentes, situações de risco ou de emergência ambientais e sobre substâncias tóxicas ou perigosas.
O direito fundamental à informação pressupõe um direito de acesso à informação e de um direito a ser informado, de forma suficiente e adequada. Em suma, são necessárias medidas que permitam o acesso do público em público, de modo a debater os riscos e decidir sobre os mesmos, no fundo informar para melhor decidir.

Western corporations are exploiting legal loopholes to dump their waste in Africa. And in Ivory Coast, the price has been death and disease for thousands.


One August morning, people living near the Akouedo rubbish dump in Abidjan, capital of the Ivory Coast, woke up to a foul-smelling air. Soon, they began to vomit, children got diarrhoea, and the elderly found it difficult to breathe. "The smell was unbelievable, a cross between rotten eggs and blocked drains," said one Abidjan resident. "After 10 minutes in the thick of it, I felt sick."
Lagos, Nigeria (Photo: Basel Action Network 2005)As they live near the biggest landfill in Abidjan, the people of Akouedo are used to having rubbish dumped on their doorstep. Trucks unload broken glass, rotting food and used syringes. Children try to make the best of their dismal playground, looking for scraps of metal and old clothes to sell for a few cents.
But this time, the waste would benefit no one. By yesterday, at least six people, including two children, had died from the fumes. Another 15,000have sought treatment for nausea, vomiting and headaches, queuing for hours at hastily set up clinics. Pharmacies have run out of medicines and the World Health Organisation has sent emergency supplies to help the health system. The Ivorian government had resigned over the matter and, so far, eight people have been arrested.
The tragedy is said to have begun on 19 August, after a ship chartered by a Dutch company offloaded 400 tons of gasoline, water and caustic washings used to clean oil drums. The cargo was dumped at Akouedo and at least 10 other sites around the city, including in a channel leading to a lake, roadsides and open grounds.
The liquids began to send up fumes of hydrogen sulphide, petroleum distillates and sodium hydroxides across the city. As the tidy-up operation begins, environmental groups have begun to ask how this occurred.
"We thought the days when companies shipped toxic waste to poor countries were over," said Helen Perivier, toxics co-ordinator for Greenpeace. "It peaked in the 1980s but since then the determination of African countries to stamp the trade out has helped yield results. That this has happened again is extraordinary."
Probo Koala, the ship that offloaded the waste, is registered in Panama and chartered by the Dutch trading company Trafigura Beheer. Trafigura had tried to offload its slops in Amsterdam, but the Amsterdam Port Services recognised its contents as toxic and asked to renegotiate terms. Trafigura said shipping delays would mean penalties of at least 250,000 US dollars (£133,000) so handed it over to a disposal company in Abidjan alongside a "written request that the material should be safely disposed of, according to country laws, and with all the correct documentation."
This story is a common one. All down the West Africa coast, ships registered in America and Europe unload containers filled with old computers, slops, and used medical equipment. Scrap merchants, corrupt politicians and underpaid civil servants take charge of this rubbish and, for a few dollars, will dump them off coastlines and on landfill sites.
Throughout the 1980s, Africa was Europe's most popular dumping ground, with radioactive waste and toxic chemicals foisted on landowners. In 1987 an Italian ship dumped a load ofwaste on Koko Beach, Nigeria. Workers who came into contact with it suffered from chemical burns and partial paralysis, and began to vomit blood.
Thereafter, the UN drew up plans to regulate the trade in hazardous waste through the Basel Convention. By 1998, the European Union had agreed to implement the ban, which prohibited the export of hazardous wastes from developed countries to the developing world, but the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand refused to sign up;global waterways are still filled with ships looking to unload their toxic waste.
And now, there is a new threat - the dumping of electronic waste, or e-waste: unwanted mobile phones, computers and printers, which contain cadmium, lead, mercury and other poisons. More than 20 million computers become obsolete in America alone each year.
The UK generates almost 2 million tons of electronic waste. Disposing of this in America and Europe costs money, so many companies sell it to middle merchants, who promise the computers can be reused in Africa, China and India. Each month about 500 container loads, containing about 400,000 unwanted computers, arrive in Nigeria to be processed. But 75 per cent of units shipped to Nigeria cannot be resold. So they sit on landfills, and children scrabble barefoot, looking for scraps of copper wire or nails. And every so often, the plastics are burnt, sending fumes up into the air.
"There is a tradition of burning rubbish all over Africa, but this new burning of electronic equipment is incredibly dangerous," said Sarah Westervelt of the Basel Action Network, a pressure group that monitors the trade in hazardous waste. In China, workers burn PVC-coated wires to get at the copper, and swirl acids in buckets to extract scraps of gold.
The United Nations Environment Programme estimates that worldwide, 20 million to 50 million tons of electronics are discarded each year. Less than 10 per cent gets recycled and half or more ends up overseas. As Western technology becomes cheaper and the latest machine comes to be regarded as a disposable fashion statement, this dumping will only intensify.
"Electronic goods are the fastest growing area of retail," said Liz Parkes, head of waste regulation at the Environment Agency. "We need to encourage people to think about whether they really need a new electronic item, and to consider what happens to the goods they throw out."
Where does our rubbish go?
* Inspections of 18 European ports in 2005 found that 47 per cent of all waste destined for export was in fact illegal. (Greenpeace)
* In 1993, there were two million tons of waste crossing the globe. By 2001, it had risen to 8.5 million. (UN)
* UK households throw away 93 million pieces of electrical equipment a year - about four items per household. Many of these end up in West Africa, India or China. (Industry Council for Electronic Equipment Recycling)
* There are more than 20 million redundant mobile phones in the UK. (Industry Council for Electronic Equipment Recycling)
* From next summer, manufacturers and importers of electrical goods will have to take responsibility for collecting and reusing old or outdated equipment. (Defra)
* It is illegal to ship hazardous waste out of Europe, but old electronic items can be sent to developing countries for "recycling". (Defra)

link: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0921-09.htm

Roxanne Lawson and Tim Newman December 7, 2006
Foreign Policy In Focus

Liberia is rich in natural resources and Africa’s largest producer of natural rubber. It is also one of the world's poorest countries. Liberia's impoverishment is directly related to the wealth generated from its natural resources; wealth that because of a history of inequality and exploitation benefits multinational corporations and some wealthy Liberians at the expense of the citizens of Liberia. However, many Liberians, along with international allies, are actively resisting this unjust system.
On top of the basic exploitation of natural resources and wealth, some multinational corporations that operate there have been accused of human rights abuses (including child labor), environmental exploitation and of taking advantage of the inability or disinterest of previous Liberian governments to monitor its activities.
One of these corporations, Firestone Natural Rubber Company a subsidiary of the Japanese company Bridgestone Americas Holding, Inc., has experienced increased international scrutiny for exploiting the people and natural environment of Liberia since May of 2005 and the publishing of a groundbreaking report that documented Firestone’s exploits in this West African nation. The report entitled “Firestone: The Mark Of Slavery” was produced by Liberian based civil society organization, Save My Future Foundation (SAMFU), and exposed the dire working and living conditions of the bulk of the company’s Liberian based labor force.
Stop Firestone
That report and the ensuing outcry launched an international coalition of Liberian and U.S. based labor rights, grassroots, human rights, and environmental organizations who came together to stop the exploitation. Aptly named, the Stop Firestone Coalition, has spent the last eighteen months documenting the history and abuses of The Firestone Tire & Rubber Company.
In 1926, U.S.—based rubber manufacturer Firestone negotiated a 99—year lease for concessions on one million acres in Liberia and formed the Firestone Rubber Plantation. In 1988 Japanese tire manufacturer Bridgestone Corporation purchased The Firestone Tire & Rubber Company creating Bridgestone/Firestone North American. Bridgestone/Firestone North American has become the largest tire and rubber company in the world; its automobile tires are ubiquitous on every continent. To date Firestone’s rubber plantation occupies a large percentage of Liberia’s land mass and was, as a result, for a time responsible for more than half the tax revenue in the country.
Harbel City is home to the Firestone rubber-processing factory. There, in a one-acre fenced-off field, low-grade rubber tapped from the plantation’s trees is openly dumped only 200 meters from the Firestone Natural Rubber Company’s Liberian company headquarters into the Farmington River. The lack of employment for unskilled laborers in Liberia, and the inability of the Liberian government, past and present, to monitor the activities of the Company have given rise to the abuse of rubber workers as well as exploitive living conditions.
Exploiting Workers
Firestone’s officially 14,000-person Liberian workforce is comprised mostly (approximately 70%) of rubber tappers who are largely illiterate and unskilled labors. In November 2005, the International Labor Rights Fund (ILRF) filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of former child laborers and their children. The workers’ suit charges Firestone with employing forced labor, and describes the miserable and inhumane treatment they and their children must endure in their daily struggle for survival.
Tappers and their children are held in virtual bondage, isolated from the world on a million—acre plantation and dependent on Firestone for everything from wages to lodging to food and medicine, all of which are desperately inadequate. To note a particularly egregious example, Bridgestone/Firestone housing has not been renovated since its construction in 1926. Most of the houses do not include running water or indoor toilets.
In May 2006, the United Nations Mission in Liberia (UNMIL) released a report, “Human Rights in Liberia’s Rubber Plantations: Tapping into the Future” addressed the horrid conditions that Firestone workers endure. In order to meet the daily quota of approximately 650 trees per day, each tapper would have to work at least twenty-one hours a day if tapping one tree takes them only 1.7 minutes from start to finish to tap a tree. If, for example, it took a worker five minutes each to tap trees it would take them almost three full days to complete one day’s quota. As Bridgestone/Firestone North American management does not enforce its child labor policy but does enforce its quotas, parents often bring their children to work in order to meet the daily quotas and garner a barely livable wage. Instead of attending school, these children often work for 10 to 12 hours a day without proper diets and must carry heavy buckets of rubber latex treated with toxic pesticides.
Environmental Negligence
Liberia-based Green Advocates has joined SAMFU in documenting Bridgestone/ Firestone’s abuses and have confirmed the habitual release of suspected toxins into the environment and the Farmington River as well as the exposure of plantation workers to compounds and chemicals that are internationally recognized as toxic and environmentally damaging.
Bridgestone/ Firestone’s dumping in the Farmington River is polluting Liberian’s waterways and is hazardous to the communities that live along the river; depending on it for fishing, bathing, and drinking water. Bridgestone/ Firestone’s actions have made a once vibrant ecosystem and river way into one that is nearly dead; catfish seem to be the only life form that have survived the harsh chemicals drained into the river.
The river around the rubber plantation is polluted with the effluence from the factory that spews out chemicals 24-hours a day, seven days a week. One polluted river seven miles inland supplies numerous villages on its way to the Atlantic Ocean. “No fishing” signs are placed all around the rivers and the communities that depend on the rivers for their survival are neglected and ignored. The Firestone tappers have one hand pump per community but when water levels drop during the rainy season they are forced to drink water from the nearby rivers and creaks.
Bridgestone/ Firestone has admitted that they use chemicals to coagulate and preserve latex as well as to increase the productive capacity of rubber trees but maintain that they are in compliance with Liberia’s environmental laws. Despite their assertions it is plainly apparent that there is no waste management or disposal system in place to protect Liberia's waterways, soil, and other natural resources from the company’s dumping. To date Bridgestone/ Firestone has refused to publicly disclose the identity and quantity of all toxic compounds and chemicals that it releases into the environment or that it transports. Firestone has failed to take responsibility for this situation and follow international law that stipulates that corporations must supply modern tools to protect workers on the job from coming into contact with harmful chemicals.
Fighting Back
Since early 2005 Save Our Future Foundation, Green Advocates, and the International Labor Rights Fund have been joined by Liberian and U.S. based non-governmental organizations and have launched the Stop Firestone campaign which is dedicated to ending the exploitation of Liberia's land, children, and workers.
They have been joined by the Institute for Policy Studies, Friends of the Earth-US, the Center for Democratic Empowerment, TransAfrica Forum, Rainbow PUSH, the RFK Memorial Center for Human Rights and other organizations that are working to educated the U.S. public and draw greater international attention to the issues effecting Liberia’s workers and the country’s environmental health.
To officially launch the Stop Firestone Campaign, these organizations chose July 26—Liberia’s Independence Day—to mark the beginning of the end of the 80 years of Firestone’s exploitation of Liberia and her people.
The coalition called on its members and people across the U.S. to come together as concerned consumers and take action as Firestone Complete Auto Care retail locations in 41 states from San Francisco, CA to Nashville, TN and Wheaton, MD. People bearing letters to store managers and to Firestone Rubber president Dan Adomitis expressed their dismay that they were, through their bicycle and car tires, a party to the exploitation of others.
In the coming months, the coalition will build on the success of the Day of Action to increase public awareness of Firestone’s abuses and pressure on the company to change its policies. We will be continuing our outreach to many constituencies including members of Congress, students, faith groups, unions, environmentalists, NASCAR fans, consumers and many more.
The Stop Firestone Campaign is part of a larger international movement for corporate reform. The company’s human rights and environmental abuses are related to the problem of corporate-led globalization which privileges profits for few over the lives of many. The coalition of groups, which was formed to challenge this model, is part of a counter-globalization movement that seeks to bring together people across boundaries to promote global justice. We hope that readers will join us in our continued efforts to hold Firestone accountable and will remember where the rubber really meets the road in Liberia.

link:http://www.fpif.org/fpiftxt/3766