Georgina Downs

Georgina Downs, FRSA is the founder of the UK Pesticides Campaign. After years of ill-health and following exposure to pesticide use on agricultural land near to where she lived, she started the campaign to change the UK Government's regulations governing use of agricultural pesticides in areas where many people have been and continue to be impacted adversely.

UK Pesticides Campaign

Researching the subject of pesticides and their effects on human health, Downs decided to challenge government regulations. The UK Pesticides Campaign was started in 2001. It centres on the issue of pesticide exposure for people in agricultural areas. Her campaign resulted in the UK Government initially asking their own advisors - the ACP (Advisory Committee on Pesticides) - to conduct a study in 2002 into current practice using evidence supplied by Downs. The ACP subsequently dismissed the evidence as inadequate. Late in 2004, as a direct result of Downs' campaign, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution was requested by DEFRA Ministers to conduct a study into the evidence regarding the risks to people from crop-spraying. The RCEP's report agreed with Downs' claim that current regulations are inadequate; however, the report proposed that a mere five-metre buffer zone be imposed around any agricultural land that is subject to spraying.

She later won a landmark High Court Judicial Review action in 2008 against the Government for failing to protect people in the countryside from pesticides and also knowingly allowing residents to continue to suffer from adverse health effects without taking any action to prevent the exposure, risks and adverse impacts occurring. The judgement concluded that Downs had produced “solid evidence that residents have suffered harm to their health”, particularly in relation to acute effects, and that “a different approach” should have been adopted and accordingly there has “been both a failure to have regard to material considerations and a failure to apply the [European] Directive properly.” This was the first known legal case of its kind to reach the High Court to directly challenge the Government's pesticide policy and approach regarding crop spraying in rural areas. The ruling is obviously a very significant and landmark ruling for the potentially millions of residents throughout the country who, like Downs, live in the locality of pesticide sprayed fields.[1] The press release Georgina Downs issued regarding her High Court victory and the full statement she made outside the High Court on 14 November 2008 can be seen on her UK Pesticides Campaign website at:- www.pesticidescampaign.co.uk.

However, DEFRA appealed the ruling and it was overturned in the Court of Appeal in July 2009, but only as a result of bizarrely substituting Downs' evidence with the conclusions of a Government requested and funded report four years earlier in 2005. This meant that the Court of Appeal Judgment was not even based on the same case, arguments and evidence that had led to her landmark victory in the High Court. In reviewing a High Court judgment the Court of Appeal would have needed to have based its judgment on the same case, arguments and evidence that had led to that High Court judgment, but did not. Downs took her case to the European Court of Human Rights, where it is pending.

Awards

RSA

Downs was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in September 2008.

Journalism

Georgina Downs is also a registered journalist under both the British Guild of Agricultural Journalists (GAJ) and also the International Federation of Agricultural Journalists (IFAJ) and has written a number of articles on behalf of the campaign for various publications.

Links

Further reading

References

  1. UK Pesticides Campaign website
This article is issued from Wikipedia - version of the 11/30/2016. The text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share Alike but additional terms may apply for the media files.