In a ‘Decision’ published on Monday 31 March, the Council of Europe’s European Committee of Social Rights has unanimously declared “inadmissible” the application by associations which, in March 2024, demanded that France improve access to water in Guadeloupe and provide compensation for chlordecone pollution in the French West Indies.
The Committee bases this inadmissibility on the fact that the “Charter safeguards [relating to social rights] that France has accepted as binding on its metropolitan territory do not apply to these overseas territories”.
In a joint press release, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH, which lodged the complaint), the Human Rights League (LDH) and the Kimbè Rèd F.W.I. association concluded that “the European Committee of Social Rights endorses France’s discrimination against the so-called ‘overseas’ territories”.
To remedy this, France would need to produce the declaration provided for in Article L§2 of the Charter of Social Rights, which the three signatory organisations urge it to do.
For its part, the Committee of Social Rights notes that the absence of this declaration results in “a situation in which French citizens in these territories are afforded significantly lower levels of social rights protection in terms of European human rights law than their counterparts in metropolitan areas”.
Link to the ‘Decision’: https://aeur.eu/f/g6v (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)