Sutradhar (FC) (Appellant) v. Natural Environment Research Council (Respondents) Pays/Territoire Royaume-Uni Type de cour Nationale - cour supérieure Date Jul 5, 2006 Source UNEP, InforMEA Nom du tribunal House of Lords Siège de la cour London Juge Lord Nicholls of BirkenheadLord HoffmannLord Walker of GestingthorpeLord Brown of Eaton-under-HeywoodLord Mance Numéro de référence [2006] UKHL 33 Langue Anglais Sujet Eau Mot clé Toxicité/empoisonnement Résumé The question in this case was whether the claimant, who lives in Bangladesh, had a reasonable prospect of success in an action against the Natural Environment Research Council ("NERC") for negligence in issuing a geological report which he says induced the health authorities in Bangladesh not to take steps which would have ensured that his drinking water was not contaminated by arsenic. In consequence he said that he had suffered injury from arsenical poisoning. The Court of Appeal decided that the claimant had no reasonable prospect of satisfying a court that in all the circumstances the NERC owed him a duty of care. The House of Lords agreed. It found the claim to be hopeless. The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the World Bank and other non-governmental organizations had installed more than 4 million shallow hand pumped tube wells to supply drinking water in rural areas all over the country. The object of this programme was to give the people of Bangladesh access to clean drinking water instead of the contaminated pond and other surface water which had been responsible for gastrointestinal diseases and high infant mortality in the past. In many cases the water from these shallow wells, though free of harmful bacteria and other organisms, was contaminated with arsenic. At least until 1993, no one thought of testing the tubewell drinking water for arsenic. The British Geological Survey (BGS) was founded in 1835 and is now a department of NERC. BGS was commissioned to undertake tests of efficiency of tubewell designs in Bangladesh, but in this connection BGS did not test their water samples for arsenic. It was stated that standard procedures for testing ground water at the time did not include tests for arsenic. The consequences of the failure to test for arsenic have been that of the 125 million inhabitants of Bangladesh, between 35 million and 77 million were at risk of drinking contaminated water and described the situation as the greatest environmental disaster that had ever happened. The question the House of Lords examined was whether BGS owed the claimant and others like him a duty to take reasonable care to test whether the water contained arsenic or not to issue a report which gave the impression that testing for arsenic was unnecessary. The House of Lords noted that BGS had no connection with the drinking water project and no one asked them to test the water for potability. They owed no duty to the government or people of Bangladesh to test the water for anything. The claimant’s allegation was that BGS knew or ought reasonably to have known that the report would be relied upon as a statement that the tubewell water of Bangladesh was fit to drink. More specifically, that it did not contain arsenic or any other toxic substances. In the opinion of the House of Lords it was quite impossible to find any such statement in the report. The report stated absolutely clearly that the samples had been tested for the presence of a number of named elements and drew attention to the fact that the presence or absence of some of these elements (presence of iron, absence of iodine) could be relevant to the toxicity of the water to animals and humans. It said nothing about arsenic. No one could suppose that the BGS had tested the water for arsenic. Texte intégral sutrad-1.htm