The Paris Court of Appeals rejected Thursday an appeal to hold Monsanto and fourteen other agrochemical firms for their role in producing Agent Orange for the US armed forces, citing legal immunity from prosecution as they worked at the order of a sovereign government, according to local media. 

Agent Orange is a mixture of equal parts of two herbicides, 2,4,5-T, and 2,4-D which contain the highly toxic TCDD/dioxin which have been known to cause major health problems and deformities for those who come into contact with it, primarily children. The product was first invented in the US in the 1940s and was used in industrial agriculture and to control plant growth near infrastructure sites. Between 1961 and 1971, the US military conducted nearly 20,000 missions and dropped around 50 million liters of Agent Orange containing 366kg of TCDD/dioxin on up to 26,000 villages over an area affecting around 4.8 million people. Agent Orange was sprayed at up to 20 times the concentration the manufacturers recommended for killing plants.

Plaintiff Tran To Nga, who was born in the southern province of Soc Trang, was exposed to dioxin during the Vietnam War. She alleged that medical examination showed that the concentration of dioxin in her blood was higher than the prescribed standard and that she suffered from five of the seventeen diseases recognized by the US as illnesses caused by Agent Orange. She also alleged that her children all suffer from heart and bone defects and that her first child died at 17 months old due to a congenital heart defect. 

Hers is one of the few cases that has legal standing under a law that protects French citizens from another country that harms them. In 2013, the Evry Judicial Court granted Nga leave to file against the chemical companies that supplied herbicides to the US military. However, it decided in 2021 that the suit was inadmissible as the companies enjoyed legal immunity. The Paris Court of Appeals upheld this earlier decision.

In a press statement, the Spokesperson of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Pham Thu Hang said:

We have recently received information about this matter. Vietnam regrets the ruling by the Paris Court of Appeal and has repeatedly expressed its stance on the issue. Although the war has ended, its severe consequences continue to profoundly impact our country and people, including the long-term and serious effects of AO/dioxin. Vietnam strongly supports victims of AO/dioxin and calls on the chemical companies that produced and supplied the toxin to the US during the war in Vietnam, which has caused millions of Vietnamese to suffer, to take responsibility for the damage.

Nga immediately vowed to appeal to the Court of Cassation, France’s highest court. In a press release, Nga’s counsel, William Bourdon and Bertrand Repolt called the ruling “contrary to the modernity of law and international law and European law.”