President of the Appeal Court of Paris has accepted that our claim will be pleaded in urgency the 14th of April 2005, with a clear order that The Clemenceau cannot go to India for ship breaking before this date.

By an ordinance of the 22nd of March 2005, the first president of the Appeal Court of Paris has considered that an immediate departure of the CLEMENCEAU to India is constituting a danger in relation to the rights defended by ANDEVA and BAN ASBESTOS in their claim which aims to impeach the export of the ship containing asbestos waste to India in order to complete the asbestos removal in an Indian shipyard. As per a media release dated 22nd March, 2005 of Ban Asbestos France, a Paris based environmental group.

The case will be appealed by priority and will be pleaded in the appeal court of Paris, on 14th of April 2005.

Also plans are afoot to scrap the SS Norway, the vessel, built as the SS France some 45 years ago. In March 2005, members of the ruling centre-left coalition, members of the Greens delegation to the German Bundestag parliament raised alarm over the environmental hazards that could be unleashed during the scrapping process. They rightly say that it is necessary to remove asbestos from the vessel before allowing it to be sent off to Asian scrapyards like Alang shipyard in India.

Large large ships like The Clemenceau and SS Norway are sent to scrapyards where the vessels are dismantled by hand. The ships are hauled up onto the beach where unskilled manual labourers cut them apart. This leaves these men vulnerable to potentially hazardous substances like lead, asbestos, cadmium and dioxins which are likely to be present in an older vessel such as the SS Norway. This vessel is lying at a pier in the German port of Bremerhaven, where she has been berthed since an explosion ripped through one of her four boilers on 25 May 2003, killing several people. The families of the crewmen fight protracted legal battles for compensation and are caught in the complicated legal wrangling of American courts because the vessel is foreign owned while the victims were non-US citizens.

The ship was launched into service in 1962, when the SS. France was the pride of the French Line. At 315 metres, she was the longest ocean liner in the world, built to carry first and tourist class passengers in unrivaled elegance and luxury. Its service was suspended in 1974, barely 12 years after the ship's launch. Some predicted even then that the ship would be sold for scrap. She was bought by Norwegian Caribbean Line and renamed the SS Norway.

Such ships contain asbestos, carcinogenic PCBs, toxic chemicals and other dangers along with environmentally hazardous oil and coolants. Environmental regulations seem a headache to the ship-owners in countries like France and US. According to The Washington Times (February 22, 2005), as many as 100 of the world's oldest and most dangerous oil tankers, more than 12 percent of the global fleet will have to scrapped soon when new International Maritime Organization (IMO) regulations come into force on April 5, 2005. Old tankers, which contain toxic waste such as waste oil, asbestos and PCBs cannot be sent to breakers in traditional ship breaking nations such as India because it is illegal under international law.

The IMO, UN Basel Convention representatives and the International Labor Organization are in search of legal solution to this problem.

At present, the only legal way to send aging oil tankers to Asian countries like India for scrapping is to clean them first, which few European shipyards can do. Until October 2004 tanker owners had evaded the Basel Convention's rules by claiming that the hulks, which are to be broken up, were actually ships for recycling. Now that the EU has stated that the practice was no longer legal and the ships must either be cleaned before export or be dismantled in Europe, Ban Asbestos Network of India (BANI) hopes that The Clemenceau will meet the law of its own land.