We invite you to sign this open letter or to write yourself to Novartis. But don't forget to sent us a copy and to tell us if you want to join the committee.
Open Letter
Mr. Daniel Vasella, President of the Committee of the Group Novartis.
Ladies and Gentlemen shareholders,We citizens declare:
You have decided to take the responsibility to produce and to sell genetically modified organism (GMO) even if you are not aware of the consequences in the future on the environment and on the beings. Therefore you take important risks for the entire humanity. You know it and so do we.
Serving a totalitarian regime, the engineers, the technicians and the responsible persons for the nuclear plant of Tchernobyl were as conscious as the ones from the Three Miles Island, but they were involved in a system of political impunity and economical constraint disregarding the minimal principles of precaution. The Ukrainians for generation will have to pay with their soil, their blood, the bill of the nuclear energy "miracle" exploited by a despotic government imposing just t after the catastrophe. If the nuclear irradiation will draw off over some centuries, it will be otherwise for the Tchernobyl biogenetics.
Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen shareholders, thousand of scientists at your service create the GMO in your laboratories. You considerable economic power provides you with a force on the United States politics prisoners of a frenetic competition. This takes you very "naturally" to wish to optimise as fast as possible the rentability of your investments. Moreover constrained by an unrestrained competitiveness with Monsanto, Roche, Rhône-Poulenc, Bayer, Cargill or Pioneer the obligation to obtain results and the inclination to take risk are stimulated. To which rights and ethic values do you refer yourself when you produce new being, which can not exist naturally? Moreover your research will not just stay with beings, which brings you gains. It seems that the aim of Novartis is to evince the intellectual propriety rights over the GMO and to patent animals and plants.
If the controversies are so strong, among the great public as much as the scientists, this means that the pertinence and the urgency of the immediate exploitation of the genetic genius are not established. Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen shareholders, why do you want to steal away in front of consumers demands of labelling, which allow to trace the genetic manipulation in food already commercialised by you?
Refusing all proposition of a moratory for production and the commercialisation of the GMO, especially in agriculture you adopt a radical position. You estimate yourself well informed and you refuse the principle of precaution? You take a very heavy responsibility in front of unknown techniques where the risks are of giant proportion. An immeasurable responsibility.
Consequently, we want to inform you that a procedure of Human Rights Violation concerning crimes against the humanity will be engaged in front of the International Tribunal in case of a catastrophe resulting from an application of the genetic genius.
Name Address Organisation Signature . . .
Please send your open letter to:
Novartis SA
Boîte Postal
CH 4002 BâleAnd a copy to:
CASII
COMITE POUR L'ARRET DES SOCIETES A IRRESPONSABILITES ILLIMITES
BP 1001
CH 4004 Bâle
E-mail: casi@datacomm.ch