" India: Environmental racism enabled forty years of injustice for survivors of Bhopal gas tragedy", 1 December 2024

Forty years ago, a deadly gas leak from a pesticide plant in the city of Bhopal in India killed at least 22,000 people. Since then, Bhopal has been a ‘sacrifice zone’ for the US-based chemical company Union Carbide Corporation (UCC), and its later owner the Dow Chemical Company (Dow), as well as the US and Indian authorities, in which half a million people across multiple generations continue to suffer.

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Thousands of tonnes of toxic waste remain buried in and around the abandoned plant to this day leading to ongoing and expanding water pollution. This is clearly indicative of the area being a ‘sacrifice zone’ – an area so severely polluted or contaminated that it has demonstrable and devastating consequences on the health of local inhabitants.

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a report documenting how entrenched environmental racism, through systemic and intergenerational discrimination, has enabled the lack of accountability of both state and corporate actors and the failure to ensure a comprehensive reparations programme. Responses from the companies are available in the annex of the report.

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The report identifies environmental racism as numerous interconnected human rights violations which include the adverse impacts of environmental degradation on the rights to life, health, an adequate standard of living, education and other substantive rights, the encroachment on the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, and the violation of the right to freedom from discrimination.

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Amnesty International has asked shareholders to end their relationship with Dow and consider withdrawing their investment from the chemicals company if it fails to take meaningful and rapid action