FRANCE: The French government yesterday suffered the embarrassment of having to call back the decomissioned aircraft-carrier Clémenceau six weeks after the warship, laden with toxic waste, set sail for India.
"The Clémenceau will turn around in the coming hours or days," defence minister Michèle Alliot-Marie announced at a press conference. "It will go through the Cape of Good Hope and will take about three months to reach French waters."
The ship will drop anchor in the Breton military port of Brest, pending a final decision on its fate by the Paris administrative tribunal.
Passage through the Suez Canal - for which the fee would be €1.3 million - was deemed too expensive. Last month, Egyptian authorities kept the Clémenceau waiting in the Mediterranean for 11 days while they demanded more information about the toxic waste it contains.
On Tuesday, the Élysée Palace announced that Jacques Chirac was personally taking charge of the issue. Yesterday, Mr Chirac ordered that the ship be brought back to France minutes after the council of state, France's highest administrative authority, ruled that transfer of the ship to India should be "suspended".
The French president's official visit to Delhi on February 19th risked being blighted by the controversy over the aircraft-carrier. The council of state sided with four associations which maintained that the Clémenceau was "hazardous waste". The French government still considered it a warship.
On January 16th, Indian authorities forbade the ship from entering their territorial waters pending a ruling by the Indian supreme court, which was to have been handed down tomorrow. Ms Alliot-Marie said France's decision to repatriate the ship made the Indian ruling "irrelevant".
Greenpeace and the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) hailed the decision as a "victory for Indian workers".
Ms Alliot-Marie claimed the French government had received assurances the Indian workers who were to have removed asbestos, PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls) and heavy metals from the ship would have worn protective clothing and been under medical supervision.
Greenpeace and the FIDH have no objection to old ships being dismantled for scrap in Asia, but insist toxic substances be removed first. The Basel Convention prohibits the export of toxic wastes from developed nations to non-OECD countries.
Decontamination costs 10 times more in Europe than in India, and no one in Europe dismantles old ships for scrap.
Ms Alliot-Marie said she would work with her European counterparts to create a European infrastructure to decontaminate decommissioned ships. Some 700 vessels are sunk around the world each year by unscrupulous owners.
Mr Chirac has also ordered a study to "establish with certainty" the quantities of asbestos still in the ship. Technopure, which was subcontracted to remove asbestos from the Clémenceau in Toulon harbour, claimed to have removed 115 tonnes. But the dump where the waste was buried received only 85 tonnes. The ministry of defence admitted on February 12th that it could not account for 30 tonnes of asbestos.
The council of state based yesterday's decision on a recommendation by Yann Aguila, an independent magistrate.
"Waste is a substance which the owner gets rid of, or intends to get rid of," Mr Aguila wrote.
"This hull is destined to be abandoned, and the presence of asbestos on board makes it toxic waste."
Estimates of the amount of dangerous substances still on board the Clémenceau range from a few dozen to a thousand tonnes. "Whatever the precise quantity, it's more than the threshold of 0.1 per cent [which classifies waste as hazardous]," Mr Aguila wrote.
On February 8th, the European Commission gave Paris one month to explain why sending the Clémenceau to India did not violate the Basel Convention.
François Hollande, the Socialist party leader, said the council of state "inflicted a snub on the government".
The whole episode "seriously tarnishes the image of France and of the president," he added.
Ms Alliot-Marie blamed the socialists, in power for the first five years after the Clémenceau was decommissioned in 1997, who left it rusting in Toulon harbour.