Editor’s note: Abdurrahman is currently working for Doing Business
Right project at the Asser Institute as an intern. He received his LL.M.
International and European Law from Tilburg University and currently he is
a Research Master student at the same university.
After the collapse of Rana Plaza which claimed the
lives of 1,138 mostly garment workers and left thousands more injured, the
global outcry for improved worker safety in the ready-made garment (RMG)
industry of Bangladesh caused by global public interest, media attention and harrowing stories of workers has led to the emergence of various international and
national initiatives to address the issue. Three of these initiatives are the Accord on Fire and Building Safety in Bangladesh (the Accord), the Alliance for Bangladesh Worker Safety (the Alliance) and the National Tripartite Plan of Action on Fire Safety
and Structural Integrity in the Garment Sector of Bangladesh (the National Initiative).
Although on the surface, these initiatives appear to be
quite similar and have the primary objective of improving worker safety in the
RMG sector of Bangladesh through inspections and identification of fire,
structural and electrical remediations for garment factories, they show
considerable differences when looked more carefully. These differences
influence the outcomes of the three initiatives on factory remediation for
fire, structural and electrical safety in the RMG sector in Bangladesh. In this
blog, after a brief description of each initiative (for a broader description,
see here), I will discuss the effectiveness of the remediation
processes introduced by the Accord, the Alliance and the National Tripartite
Plan.More...
Editor's note: Sara Martinetto is a research intern at
the T.M.C. Asser Institute. She has recently completed her LLM in Public
International Law at the University of Amsterdam. She holds interests in
Migration Law, Criminal Law, Human Rights and European Law, with a
special focus on their transnational dimension.
More than 11000 deaths and 25000
hospitalisations: the numbers divulged by the prosecution expert report assessing the human consequence of
the operation of Ilva industries in the Italian city of Taranto are staggering.
The environmental disaster caused by the plant brought the whole area to its
knees and, in spite of all the efforts made, is still on-going. This is the
story of a never-ending conflict. A conflict between different rights, which
need to be balanced; between public authorities, who bear responsibility for
ensuring and protecting those rights; between different normative levels and
powers, given the numerous infringement proceedings opened by the EU Commission
and the most recent claims lodged to the European Court of Human Rights
(ECtHR). In the following sections I will try to shed some light on the main
legal aspects of this tragic saga. For clarity, this article is divided in two posts:
the first deals with the national level, while the second focuses on the
supranational dimension of the case.More...