A Brazilian court has found Swiss agrochemicals giant Syngenta responsible for the murder of a rural farm worker carried out by private armed militia. The 1st Civil Court of Cascavel ruled that the company must pay compensation to the family of Valmir Mota de Oliveira (aka Keno) for the moral and material damages caused, as well as for the attempted murder of Isabel do Nascimento de Souza, another victim. Valmir Motta, a regional leader of the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) was killed during protests at a Syngenta research farm in the southern state of Parana back in October 2007. Activists had occupied the farm which they said illegally produced genetically modified crops within an environmental protection zone around the famous Iguacu water falls. Heavily armed militiamen of NF Segurança, a security service used by Syngenta, showed up at the farm, killing Keno and injurying several other protesters. The case was taken to court in 2010 to determine what role Syngenta played in ordering the militia to drive away the peasants. In his sentence, published on November 17 in the Paraná State Official Gazette, the judge found that what happened on Syngenta’s property was “a massacre disguised as repossession of property”. Syngenta claimed that the attack was carried out by militia acting on the orders of landowners rather than the company but the judge ruled that “bad choice in outsourcing security services, as well as the indirect funding of illicit activities, is a factor that generates civil liability”. The sentence was welcomed by social movements as a step forward in holding companies accountable for human rights violations: “Transnational companies currently have considerable freedom to operate on a transnational basis, but there are no national or international norms or mechanisms sufficient to oblige companies to respect human rights or to hold them accountable for cases of human rights violations,” said Fernando Prioste, a lawyer of human rights organisation Terra de Direitos accompanying the case. He described the Syngenta sentence as an exception to this rule. The court sentence is not yet definitive as Syngenta could appeal to the Paraná State Court of Appeals. (ab)