TrustHLT/LaCour huggingface dataset:
GR1 (Government): In accordance with evolving experience, scientific development and new studies undertaken.
GR1 (Government): This is emphasised in the consensus statement from the 1993 so-called Gude Sunn Conference, which has been previously submitted to the Court by the applicants.
GR1 (Government): The same point of gradual awareness of all parties involved was made in the report from the follow-up conference from Bergen in 2005.
GR1 (Government): That report has been submitted to the Court as appendix number 9 to the Government's letter on 28 August this year.
GR1 (Government): As to what the authorities did in response to what was known at the time, the Government points to the following five sets of arguments.
GR1 (Government): Basically the authorities took active steps to ensure that the tables in use did not constitute health risks.
GR1 (Government): This was for instance the case in 1984 when some diving companies submitted new tables for saturation diving.
GR1 (Government): The Petroleum Directorate that year initiated a project which resulted in 1986 in the so-called Hempelman Report, which also has been submitted to the Court as appendix number 2 to the Government's letter on 28 August.
GR1 (Government): The Hempelman Report has also been dealt with in section 585 of the Losius Report.
GR1 (Government): Secondly there was a dramatic reduction in the number of reported incidents of decompression sickness already as from 1980.
GR1 (Government): This is shown in a table prepared by the Petroleum Directorate, which has been annexed to the Government's letter to the Court on 28 August as appendix 8.
GR1 (Government): The Government submits that this reduction indicates that the joint efforts of Norwegian authorities and the diving industry already from the early 1980s have proven effective.
GR1 (Government): Thirdly the Government emphasises the need to clarify the concept of harmonising of tables, which is used in the Court's question number 2b.
GR1 (Government): Now the concept seems, at least in applicants' observations, to be confused with two other forms of efforts undertaken by the Government.
GR1 (Government): For one it seems to be confused with the authorities' general work on collecting information and experience regarding tables.
GR1 (Government): The purpose of this work was to enable the authorities to evaluate the tables disclosed by the companies.
GR1 (Government): The Hempelmann Report from 1986 is an example of this.
GR1 (Government): The concept of harmonising should further not be mixed up with the authorities' efforts to develop specific national tables for Norwegian companies in the early 1970s.
GR1 (Government): This is mentioned in section 574 of the Losius Report.
GR1 (Government): At this point the Losius Report's own summary in English, submitted by the Court, submitted to the Court by the applicants on 20 August, fails in its translation when it states in section 5 that the authorities made some unsuccessful attempts to develop the compression tables for general use in the North Sea in the 1970s.
GR1 (Government): The Court should bear in mind that the unsuccessful attempts referred to here were not as such concerned with harmonising.
GR1 (Government): They served as a means to assist the Norwegian industry in gaining access to the relevant market.
GR1 (Government): As a fourth point with regard to the Court's question number two.
GR1 (Government): When the work on harmonisation was initiated in 1990 there were already only small differences between the companies' decompression tables.
GR1 (Government): This is evidenced by the Petroleum Directorate's report of 1991 which was submitted as appendix three to the Government's letter to the Court on 28 August.
GR1 (Government): Thus the harmonising of tables which was completed in 1991 was a supplement, or rather a complement, to what had already been accomplished with regard to the safety of the divers.
GR1 (Government): That being said, the Government also observes that to its knowledge no other country has yet introduced standardised tables for saturation dives.
GR1 (Government): Finally in responding to question number two it must be recalled that Norwegian authorities have been active in reducing the risks involved in offshore diving ever since operations on the Norwegian continental shelf began in the 1960s.
GR1 (Government): The extent to which the Norwegian state engaged in North Sea activities by using its regulatory and supervisory powers has been demonstrated in detail by the Government's written observations to the Court.
GR1 (Government): It may further be added that the authorities have pushed research and development in order to find a scientific basis for decompression procedures and tables that would safeguard divers' health.
GR1 (Government): An estimated 125 million euros have over time been allocated by the Norwegian Government and the industry to research and development in this area.
GR1 (Government): This follows from section 4.2 of the last year's report.
GR1 (Government): It also follows from the so-called Kromberg Report which was submitted to the Court as appendix 6 to the Government's letter to the Court on 28 August.
GR1 (Government): Finally the Government will briefly respond to the Court's question number four, namely to what extent, if at all, had the applicants' health been adversely affected by applying the tables in question.
GR1 (Government): The Government recalls that it is the duty of the applicants to furnish the Court with sufficient material to substantiate their claims.
GR1 (Government): In the view of the Government, the applicants have not provided the Court with sufficiently precise details for the Court to ascertain that there is a link of causality between the alleged violations committed and their individual health problems.
GR1 (Government): More precisely, the Court cannot, on the evidence of the present case, hold that it was in fact the omissions by Norwegian authorities not to enable the divers to assess the health risks involved in rapid tables that have been the cause of their health problems.
GR1 (Government): There might be a whole range of possible reasons why the applicants' health has been affected.
GR1 (Government): The applicants may have conducted dives that violated existing procedures and regulation at the time.
GR1 (Government): They may have been the unfortunate victims of accidents that adversely affected their health.
GR1 (Government): They may themselves have taken risks that the authorities cannot possibly have prevented.
GR1 (Government): They may have conducted diving operations in the territorial waters of other states where the regulatory regime may have been more relaxed than it has ever been in Norway.
GR1 (Government): Based on the requisite details submitted by the applicants, such hypotheses cannot, in the Government's opinion, be overruled as reasons why the applicants' health has been adversely affected by diving.
GR1 (Government): Madam President, this concludes the statement by the Norwegian Government.
GR1 (Government): I thank you for your close attention.
Nina Vajić (JudgeP): Thank you very much.
Nina Vajić (JudgeP): I call now Ms. Hellum-Lilleengen.
AP1 (Applicant): Thank you, Madam President.
AP1 (Applicant): Madam President, distinguished members of the court, as we have sought to demonstrate and we further litigate safety measures to protect divers in the North Sea were contradictory to the economic interests of the state and were therefore scarce.
AP1 (Applicant): I will respond to the questions five, one, and two raised by the court, whereas my colleague, Mr. Ludwigsen,
AP1 (Applicant): will respond to questions two, A through C, three, and four.
AP1 (Applicant): Replying to the court's question five, it is submitted that following the Supreme Court's judgment in the cases of Mr. Vilnes and Mr. Mulderdal,
AP1 (Applicant): the remaining applicants were denied access to effective remedies.
AP1 (Applicant): It follows from the court's jurisprudence that the applicants would be exempted from exhausting domestic remedies if they would have no prospect of success.
AP1 (Applicant): And these applicants brought action against the Norwegian government to the Oslo City Court with Mr. Mulderdal.
AP1 (Applicant): However, since the legal issues were similar in the applicants' cases, and in order to simplify the procedure by limiting the number of applicants in the same case, there was an agreement between the applicants, the attorney general, and the court that they would be suspended.
AP1 (Applicant): The condition for the agreement was that the suspended cases of these applicants would not lose the right to be tried pending the outcome of the pilot cases.
AP1 (Applicant): The question of liability was finally settled in the judgment from the Supreme Court in the pilot cases, leaving these suspended cases without any prospect of success.
AP1 (Applicant): Accordingly, all the applicants have fulfilled the admissibility requirement in paragraph 35, paragraph 1 of the convention.
AP1 (Applicant): And I also refer to the Norwegian government, which has agreed to this in their last submission to the court.
AP1 (Applicant): Replying to the court's question 1 and 2, the court has established a practice under articles 2 and 8, consisting in the principle that when the state knows or should have known about risks of threats to lives and health of persons within its jurisdiction, it has a positive obligation to take adequate and effective measures to protect their lives.
AP1 (Applicant): And the court has given an emphasis on the public's right to information.
AP1 (Applicant): And the state's positive obligations under article 2 of the convention largely overlap with those under article 8.
AP1 (Applicant): And in the present case, the alleged violations under both these articles contain mainly the same facts.
AP1 (Applicant): Despite the government's allegation to the contrary, the court has made no exception from the principle that the positive obligation applies in the case of dangerous activities within the work sphere.
AP1 (Applicant): And I refer to the case of Roche versus the UK.
AP1 (Applicant): In view of the facts as presented, there can be no doubt that the applicants' lives and health were at risk during the diving operations in the North Sea from 1970 to 1990 and the test diving at Nui and Nutech.
AP1 (Applicant): Nor can there be doubt that the Norwegian state knew about the risks involved.
AP1 (Applicant): Both the last year's commission and the Oslo City Court gave detailed account of the facts and concluded that the Norwegian authorities were aware of the danger that occupational diving in the North Sea implied.
AP1 (Applicant): As to the decompression tables, the authorities were aware that the diving companies kept them undisclosed, that decompression speed was a competition factor between the diving companies.
AP1 (Applicant): They knew that the health of the divers thus ran counter to strong commercial interests.
AP1 (Applicant): And I refer to the last year's report on this particular item, paragraph 574.
AP1 (Applicant): To illustrate that the Norwegian Petroleum Directorate was alerted about the risks involved in the tables, I'll quote from their letter to the Diving Medical Advisory Committee in 1984.
AP1 (Applicant): Quote, even when taking into consideration the different approaches to establishing a decompression profile based on different attitudes to the effect of time, pressure, oxygen, and other factors on gas elimination during decompression, we find the difference between the slowest and fastest table disturbing.
AP1 (Applicant): The difference in decompression time from 1,000 feet is close to a week when comparing the fastest and slowest table.
AP1 (Applicant): The directorate found that the fastest tables were faster than emergency tables, looking more like a decompression sickness treatment.
AP1 (Applicant): It also expressed concern that the tables applying high partial pressures of oxygen and considered both concerns to relate, and I quote, directly to the health and safety of the divers.
AP1 (Applicant): Consequently, there can be no doubt that the Norwegian authorities were aware of the risks involved in North Sea diving operations.
AP1 (Applicant): As regards to test diving, the state was one of the owners of new tech facilities where test diving was executed until 1985 and was the condition provider for the petroleum exploitation in the North Sea, obliging the oil companies to prove that it was possible to install and maintain pipes and platforms down to 450 meters below the ocean, thus obliging test dives to take place.
AP1 (Applicant): The state also had observers at the test sites.
AP1 (Applicant): Several medical experts publicly expressed worries that health concerns were pushed aside.
AP1 (Applicant): On site, the authorities observed that dives were not even aborted when the divers fell unconscious or demanded oil stop.
AP1 (Applicant): However, they did not intervene.
AP1 (Applicant): Concluding that the state had the relevant knowledge, it had a duty to take appropriate effective measures.
AP1 (Applicant): To share the information with the persons at risk will often be the easiest, accessible, and most rudimentary way to safeguard convention rights laid down in Articles 2 and 8 of the Convention.
AP1 (Applicant): The state's obligation to provide information under Article 8 is stated in Guerra v. Italy.
AP1 (Applicant): In that case, the state failure to provide the local population with information about risks and how to proceed in the event of an accident of a chemical fertilizer factory amounted to a violation of Article 8.
AP1 (Applicant): Also, the court's judgment in Roche v. the UK
AP1 (Applicant): was related to information due to the risk of chemical related to information duty and to health damage from work that Roche had volunteered to participate in.
AP1 (Applicant): In that case, the court found that the state had failed to provide information after his work operations, while the applicants most importantly lacked information before they started each dive.
AP1 (Applicant): My point is that both Roche and the applicants needed the actual information to be able to assess what they should do to avoid unnecessary risk of damage to their health.
AP1 (Applicant): Roche needed the information to assess what kind of examinations and treatment he should seek.
AP1 (Applicant): And the divers needed the actual information to assess whether or not they should take part in the diving operation.
AP1 (Applicant): In the case of Önerlitz v. Turkey,
AP1 (Applicant): the court found that the state's obligation to take positive measures increases in relation to dangerous activities in comparison with nature conditions.
AP1 (Applicant): The court found that the authorities had failed in not providing the slum inhabitants with information about the risks they ran by living in the area.
AP1 (Applicant): And even if it had provided information, it remains responsible as it had not taken necessary practical measures to avoid the risks to people's lives.
AP1 (Applicant): The court stated that the positive obligation, quote, ìindisputably applies in the particular context of dangerous activities, where in addition, special emphasis must be placed on regulations geared to the special features of the activity in question, particularly with regard to the level of the potential risk to human lives.
AP1 (Applicant): They must govern the licensing, setting up, operation, security, and supervision of the activity, and must make it compulsory for all those concerned to take practical measures to ensure the effective protection of citizens whose lives might be endangered by the inherent risk.
AP1 (Applicant): According to the recent case of Stojanovi versus Bulgaria, which concerned an alleged violation of Article 2 following the death of a paratrooper, the state appears to have a further increased positive obligation when it, quote, ìundertakes, organizes, and authorizes dangerous activities.
AP1 (Applicant): It must then ensure through a system of rules and through sufficient control that the risk is reduced to a reasonable minimum,î end of quote.
AP1 (Applicant): Following the courtís jurisprudence, one may conclude that the Norwegian state had a duty to provide an effective protection of the applicants, with a particular emphasis on the duty to provide information about the risks involved in diving operations and in rapid tables.
AP1 (Applicant): In the North Sea diving operations, the word was that diving was prudent and state-approved, which also followed from the statutory regulations.
AP1 (Applicant): Without the objective facts about the disturbing differences between the tables and the high occurrence and consequences of decompression sickness related to the tables in use, the divers had no opportunity to make a meaningful assessment of the risks involved in the operations.
AP1 (Applicant): Therefore, the Norwegian authorities had a duty to provide the divers with the piece of information necessary to assess the real risk level, including the escalation of risk connected to the table competition.
AP1 (Applicant): The state should in the least have made the risks involved in the diving tables known to the applicants by requiring a disclosure of the tables, by providing the divers with a risk assessment of the use of the tables on operations without doctors available for treatment, and by providing information about the conditions on which the authorities approved these tables, or rather the absence of any such conditions.
AP1 (Applicant): This measure would have been in accordance with the law and would have involved practically no resources and time.
AP1 (Applicant): I, however, also consider that in view of the time span of the alleged violations, it would have been an effective measure easily at hand of the authorities to require a standardized minimum decompression time by applying the most conservative parts of each of the existing tables.
AP1 (Applicant): In practice, the combination of a regulation stating that only prudent diving practices were pre-approved and the consistent practice of pre-approval of all dives and tables constituted effective disinformation towards the divers.
AP1 (Applicant): The state's positive obligation to protect the health of persons at risk is under Article 8, Paragraph 2, subject to a balancing of interests of the applicant's rights and the community as a whole.
AP1 (Applicant): According to the court's jurisprudence in Fadayeva versus Russia, the assessment is, quote, whether the government's approached the problem with due diligence and gave consideration to all the competing interests.
AP1 (Applicant): The onus is on the state to justify using detailed and rigorous data a situation in which certain individuals bear a heavy burden on behalf of the rest of the community.
AP1 (Applicant): In the present case, it is submitted that the state's lack of effective measures to protect the applicant's life and health is far from having been justified within the terms of Article 8.
AP1 (Applicant): The state has provided no reasonable explanation why to justify why for 25 years they did not oblige the diving companies to disclose their decompression tables or to comply with the most conservative tables and their own due care standard.
AP1 (Applicant): Our conclusion so far is that the state had a clear duty under the convention to require disclosure of tables and inform the divers, and in our view, also to harmonize the tables.
AP1 (Applicant): The state makes a particular emphasis on their due care standard in Paragraph 121 of the Royal Decree from 1967, which provided that the authorities should receive a plan envisaging the execution of the dive, which equipment would be used, and which safety measures would be taken.
AP1 (Applicant): However, the authorities approved these procedures regardless of the diving tables, and in most cases, without even having access to them.
AP1 (Applicant): I refer to Losius report, page 74.
AP1 (Applicant): None of the regulations that were issued before 1990 were interpreted and complied with by the authorities themselves in a way that could make them a realistic alternative measure.
AP1 (Applicant): The state had the knowledge about risks or threats to life and personal harm in the North Sea, but failed to take appropriate and efficient measures.
AP1 (Applicant): I give the word to Mr. Ludwigs.
AP2 (Applicant): Madam President, distinguished members of the court, replying to the court's question 2A to C, the applicants would not have been able to understand the diving table to a degree where they could assess its excessive risk by themselves.
AP2 (Applicant): The divers were in no position to take part in the medical discussion, so they needed digested information and conclusions, and not primarily the bare tables as such.
AP2 (Applicant): Anyway, they were also told that everything was state-approved as prudent, and that decompression sickness would not lead to permanent damage.
AP2 (Applicant): I believe that a disclosure of the tables would have had to be combined with the authorities' risk assessment.
AP2 (Applicant): It is, however, possible that having access to all the tables, the applicants could have assessed the risks themselves by comparing the tables.
AP2 (Applicant): The wide differences in decompression times could have been perceived as so alarming to the divers that this in itself could have given rise to suspicion on their part.
AP2 (Applicant): In that case, they could have been aware of which companies that used the rapid and dangerous tables, and they could, in principle, have chosen to hire elsewhere.
AP2 (Applicant): If the authorities, in addition to require disclosure of all tables, also had provided their risk assessment, it is probable that it would have constituted information that would have provided the applicants with sufficient knowledge to assess the risks involved.
AP2 (Applicant): This is our conclusion regarding to question 2A.
AP2 (Applicant): Through public pressure and fear of not gaining contracts and employees, the diving companies could possibly have been compelled to use the most conservative tables if the tables have been disclosed.
AP2 (Applicant): And if the authorities, in addition, had stuck or at least improved its own practice of pre-approving all tables, regardless of whether they were dangerous or not, it would clearly have a significant effect on the diving companies' use of rapid tables.
AP2 (Applicant): The answer to the court's question 2C about the connection between disclosure and harmonizing of table is as short as it is important.
AP2 (Applicant): Disclosure of the tables was a necessary condition for the authorities' work on the harmonizing of tables.
AP2 (Applicant): This work was completed very swiftly and easily when it finally was started and solved the problem of decompression sickness without the need of new knowledge or other material obstacles.
AP2 (Applicant): The lack of such a demand to disclose the tables also seems to have been the only real obstacle to the harmonization of tables.
AP2 (Applicant): To develop and harmonize on a new common safe table from scratch seemed difficult.
AP2 (Applicant): But to harmonize around the most conservative existing tables based on forced disclosure in 1975 would have been as easy as it was to do it based on voluntary disclosure in 1990.
AP2 (Applicant): The Lost Yoster Report, chapter 574, also quotes the Norwegian Labor Inspection Authority's letter to the University of Zurich in 16 April, 1973, stating, I quote, where helium tables to be made freely available, there would no longer be any commercial basis for secrecy regarding the tables.
AP2 (Applicant): And this would enable free exchange of views regarding the tables.
AP2 (Applicant): Concerted efforts could then be made to develop optimal diving tables, while the competitiveness of the diving companies would to a greater extent be dependent on the training and skills of the divers and the safety and reliability of the equipment.