Waste-dumping victims were silenced by media super-injunctions until WikiLeaks broke the case

Evidence

In the Trafigura case, the claimants’ out of court settlement (for 30 million pound sterling plus costs) following the WikiLeaks revelations was particularly significant for two reasons. First, the case successfully combined rich-nation digital civil disobedience with more traditional grass roots activism mounted by the afflicted poor. Second, the settlement broke a double silence: the silencing of slow violence and the silencing of the British media who, in an extraordinary measure, had been hit with a “super-injunction” that barred them from covering the parliamentary debate over the suppressed scientific Minton report warning of the toxic implications of the Trafigura contamination. The settlement was a classic instance of new media strategy, old media credibility, scientific testimony, legal resources, and grassroots activism among the poor combining to counter an assault on both the environmental and the information commons. — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 1413

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘double silence’ — corporate pollution silenced legally while media gagged — is a sharp case study for an article on how secrecy infrastructure manufactures environmental invisibility.
• ADDENDUM: Follows the earlier claim that ‘withholding chemical data from exposed communities weakens their remedies’ (ch11) — this gives a concrete legal-injunction mechanism and a counter-strategy.