High Court Environmental appeal

 

by Deborah Miarkowska

The award winning environmental campaigner, Georgina Downs, who last November won an historic high court victory against the Government over its fundamental failure to protect people in the countryside from pesticides, has lost an appeal launched by the Secretary of State for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA). Gleewire asked Downs on what grounds she thought DEFRA won the appeal, given that 320 pages of meticulously researched evidence she presented to the courts in November was described by the judge as “cogent” and “scientifically justified”. “That’s a very good question!” she replied, going on to explain that the lucrative pesticides industry, thought to be worth around £490 million in the UK and at least £40 billion globally, had “pressurised the Government to appeal”.

Downs has campaigned tirelessly for mandatory measures to be put in place to protect residents and school children from unrestricted crop spraying. She said the failure of the High Court to take her evidence into account throughout the appeal seemed like “establishment snobbery. I am not a Doctor or a Professor and so it appears that evidence presented by an ordinary citizen will not be taken seriously in the UK Courts.”

Georgina added: “People move to the countryside thinking it will be a healthy environment to bring up their children and do not know about the dangers and risks inherent in the spraying of poisonous chemicals on surrounding fields, until they themselves suffer adverse effects on their health”

Despite the court of appeal ruling, which Downs described to Gleewire as being “immaterial”, the Government has still pledged to forge ahead with its policy review over the use of pesticides.

Speaking outside the Royal Courts of Justice this morning, Tuesday July 7, Downs commented: “I would like to start by saying that I think this may well go down in history as being the most bizarre and inaccurate Judgment to have ever come out of the Court of Appeal. Last November I won a landmark victory in the High Court against the Government over pesticides.

That High Court Judgment was very clear as the Judge, Mr. Justice Collins, said that he was in “no doubt” that the Government had been acting unlawfully in its policy and approach in relation to the use of pesticides in crop spraying, and that public health, in particular rural residents and communities exposed to pesticides from living in the locality to regularly sprayed fields, was not being protected (and this applied to both acute effects and chronic long term adverse health effects).

“When granting the Government permission to appeal the High Court ruling, Mr. Justice Collins made it clear that he did not think that an appeal had a real prospect of success. However, today’s Judgment from the Court of Appeal which has overturned Mr. Justice Collins’ Judgment unanimously, has done so as a result of very wrongly (and possibly intentionally) substituting the cogently argued case I presented with that of another party. This means that almost the entire judgment has been formed on the wrong basis and does not in any way resemble the same case, arguments and evidence that Mr. Justice Collins based his Judgment on in the High Court”.

The policy director of the Soil Association, Peter Melchett, also issued a response to today’s court of appeal decision, saying: “Whatever the court of appeal says, the fact is UK regulation of pesticide spraying does not take into account the safety of schools or families living next to sprayed fields. These residents are subject to repeated doses of chemical sprays. Before today’s judgement, the National Farmers Union had admitted that farmers will have to take more care of the wellbeing of their neighbours, whatever the courts decide. The best way farmers can do this is to move to farming systems that don’t require dangerous chemicals to produce our food.”

View: www.pesticidescampaign.co.uk for detailed views.

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