British shipping companies that sell old vessels to be scrapped cheaply in dangerous, low-paid conditions in Bangladesh, India or Pakistan may now be sued in London for workers’ deaths or injuries.

In the first ruling of its kind by any higher court anywhere in the world, the UK court of appeal has held that a shipping company in London selling a vessel in south Asia could owe a legal “duty of care” to shipbreaking workers in Bangladesh even where there are multiple third parties involved in the transaction.

The landmark ruling means that Hamida Begum whose husband, Khalid Mollah, fell to his death in 2018 while working high up on a 300,000-ton oil tanker on the beach at Chittagong will now be able to sue the shipping company Maran (UK) in London.

But by putting the legal spotlight on the notoriously lax environmental and health and safety practices in Bangladesh, the ruling may open the gates for other cases and force Asian shipbreaking yards to improve working conditions.

The ruling follows decisions on two other long-running cases where impoverished communities in low-income countries were also given permission to sue multinational companies or their subsidiaries in London for alleged environmental pollution or damages...

London law firm Leigh Day argued that Mollah’s accident was foreseeable and that Maran (UK), which sold the tanker for demolition to a Dubai-based company, would have known it was going to Chittagong for demolition and should have anticipated the risk of injury to workers such as Mollah demolishing it.

Leigh Day contended that the shipping industry takes deliberate advantage of Bangladesh’s weak regulations. The result, it argued, is that wealthy shipowners get the highest prices for scrap vessels in the practical certainty that they will be broken up in Bangladesh where health and safety standards are lower than in more expensive but safer yards.

Maran argued that it did not control the ship’s ultimate destination and that there was nothing it could have, or should have, done to avoid the risks to the deceased. But Lord Justice Coulson said: “… the appellant could, and should, have insisted on the sale to a so-called ‘green’ yard, where proper working practices were in place”...