Shipbreaking, being amongst the most highly polluting industries in the world, simultaneously violates human rights laws, labour laws, and environmental laws. Having profound insight into the field of marine and environmental law, Md Saiful Karim grapples with these legal issues in his book Shipbreaking in Developing Countries: A Requiem for Environmental Justice from the Perspective of Bangladesh. While some books deal with ship dismantling and its diverse impacts, this book offers instead “the issue of global and national environmental injustice using the shipbreaking industry as an example” (p. 9).
The author frames the shipbreaking industry in the context of three different themes: “environmental justice”, “international environmental laws”, and “international maritime laws”, in order to critically analyze legal issues encompassing the industry by interconnecting these themes through six chapters. A conceptual understanding of environmental justice is explained in the first two chapters, where he characterizes the workers’ situation as a “contemporary form of economic slavery” since their work forcibly puts their lives at risk due to their poor financial status (Chapter 2).
The subsequent two chapters discuss the existing international environmental conventions germane to the shipbreaking activities. The author envisages potential in the Basel Ban Amendment to influence regional and national legislation regarding waste management, but is a little dubious about its success to prevent the north–south trade of obsolete ships because a large number of ships are sailing under “flags of convenience”. Further, he criticizes the 2009 Hong Kong International Convention for the Safe and Environmentally Sound Recycling of Ships for placing more financial and environmental burdens on developing countries than on developed countries, regarding the management of hazardous waste.
While analyzing the initiatives of Bangladesh in Chapter 5, he argues that several regulations have developed to govern the shipbreaking sector due to the worldwide attention and directions from Bangladesh's Apex Court. Still, practical implementation of those regulatory reforms is lacking due to “the serious influence of the industry on the government's decision-making process” (p. 112). The penultimate chapter touches upon two unfortunate sufferers of scrapping activity, shipbreaking workers and the surrounding natural environment, both of whom lack a voice or power in this matter. Given the shortcomings of international and national regulatory policies explored in the book, the author concludes that the foundation of the relevant frameworks is “hollow”, and concerned only with the interest of wealthy shipping industries (p. 126).
Overall, this book has successfully demonstrated how environmental injustice is occurring in Bangladesh. The discussion in the initial two chapters serves as a valuable basis for the reader to understand the critical scrutiny of technical legal instruments in subsequent chapters. The author's key argument, the failure of national and international legal instruments to acknowledge the environmental justice aspect of shipbreaking, seems convincing, as supported by his well-researched identification of the gap in relevant laws and case-studies. This book is a valuable source of reference for scholars of international environmental law, international maritime law, and professionals in the shipping industry.
