Review Essay: Sovereign Immunity: Law in an Unequal World
| Published date | 01 September 1996 |
| DOI | 10.1177/096466399600500309 |
| Author | Vinay Lal |
| Date | 01 September 1996 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
REVIEW ESSAY
SOVEREIGN IMMUNITY:
LAW IN AN UNEQUAL WORLD
VINAY LAL
University of California, Los Angeles
JAMIE CASSELS, The Uncertain Promise of Law: Lessons from Bhopal.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994, 364 pp.
Around midnight on Sunday, 2 December 1984, a large number of the resi-
dents of Bhopal were killed as methyl isocyanate (MIC), a toxic gas used in
the preparation of pesticides, which had escaped from one of the tanks of a
nearby Union Carbide plant, crept over them. Three years later the death toll
stood, on official count, at 3500, though other estimates of people killed run
to as high as 10,000; and perhaps as many as 40,000 people were permanently
disabled, maimed or rendered subject to numerous grave illnesses. The Indian
government has itself acknowledged that 521,262 persons, well over half of
the population of Bhopal, were ’exposed’ to the lethal gas. Moving with
stealth, the night intruder pounced upon a hapless people, and took the life
out of an ancient community.
Cassels recounts for us the tortuous path of litigation that eventually led,
on 14 February 1989, to a settlement, which appeared to give the message ’that
human life in India is cheap’, between the government of India and Union
Carbide brokered by the Indian Supreme Court (p. 25). News of the gas leak
had barely made its way into print before lawyers swung into action. Union
429-
430
Carbide forbade its employees from speaking to the press and at once retained
prominent Indian attorneys (pp. 113-5). Emanating from a country where
white men were routinely paid handsome sums of money for the scalps of
Indians (the ’other’ Indians), US lawyers assiduously began to engage in a
form of bounty-hunting. Melvin Belli, characterizing himself as ’a good
capitalist’, filed a $15-billion class-action suit in a US court on behalf of some
victims, and two days later John Coale, just arrived in Bhopal, got himself
hired as the city’s lawyer.
One of the consequences of this feverish legal activity was the reification of
litigation: all of the parties to the ’event’ were pushed into adopting a legalis-
tic attitude, and it was supposed that a traditional litigative process would
furnish the ’solution to the disaster’ (p. 119). The interests of the victims
became incidental to the litigative strategies of the various parties. There was
an ’obsession with secrecy’, and vital information was suppressed or
&dquo;priva-
tized&dquo; to satisfy the need of litigators, rather than being used for the benefit
of the victims’ (p. 115). Throughout, Union Carbide seemed to be attempting
to divest itself of any responsibility for the gas leak, introducing several vari-
ants of the sabotage theory: the leak was attributed to a ’disgruntled
employee’, and at other times to Sikh terrorists (pp. 8-11). The principal strat-
egy adopted by Union Carbide was to shift the onus to its Indian subsidiary,
Union Carbide India Limited (UCIL). Though Union Carbide owned 50.9
percent of UCIL, making it the principal shareholder, it was argued that
UCIL’s Bhopal plant ’at the time of the accident was operated and managed
exclusively by Indian citizens’ (pp. 43,183); and the company further claimed
that it had no involvement in the construction and operation of the Bhopal
plant, or in its day-to-day management (p.165). Union Carbide sought to hide
behind the fiction that a corporation is a ’separate legal identity distinct from
its shareholders and owners’, UCIL had a ’separate corporate personality’
...
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