How to Judge Safety Crime: Lessons From the Eternit Asbestos Maxi-Trials

Abstract

When it comes to occupational injury, disease, and fatalities, criminal prosecution and punishment is the exception. This paper focuses on three loopholes in legal strategy that make it difficult for determined social movements and committed prosecutors to secure conviction against corporate executives: they are the notions (1) that “modern” industrial risk is by essence impersonal and diluted, making the assignment of individual responsibility difficult or impossible, (2) that industrial hazard is foreign to any notion of intention, fault or responsibility, (3) that the certainty of the causal link between exposure and damages must be established for each victim on a purely individual, rather than statistical, basis. I describe how Italian prosecutors sought to circumvent these loopholes in the Eternit asbestos maxi-trials. Although there appear to be solid legal workarounds for the first and second loophole, the third one remains problematic, calling for urgent political and legal imagination.

A Systematic Policy of Misinformation on the Toxicity of Asbestos: Lobbying as Key Component of a Major Health Crisis

“…Fiber cement, or eternity, is a mixture of asbestos and fibers whose consistency gives the material its main characteristic, namely its extremely fibrous character, which makes it very suitable for various uses, especially in public works and construction. It is also the name of the cement company of the same name, founded in 1922 (now owned by the Belgian Etex Group), which registered the trademark and produced the material for decades in various industrial sites, notably in Italy and France, including the dramatically famous Casale Monferrato factory in Piedmont, at the origin of the Italian maxitrial of Turin in charge of judging the "safety crime of asbestos" (Marichalar, 2019), with more than 6,000 civil parties, and which will have no equivalent in other countries. The name eternit, which comes from the Latin aeternitas (eternity), was first patented in 1901 and the brand was bought in 1902 by a merchant, Alois Steinmann, who opened the first production unit in Niederurnen, Switzerland, the following year.…”

The Valuation of Contaminated Life: RCA in Taiwan and the Compensation of Toxic Exposure

“…The leading country is Italy, with several important ongoing cases, starting with the class action of six thousand plaintiffs against the two chairmen of the asbestos company Eternit; after victories at the District and Appeal courts in Turin, the case was dismissed by the Supreme Court of Cassation in Rome(Marichalar 2019). In France, procedures have been dragging on for years.…”