Several recent media reports on the trial procedure related to the Soma mining accident mention the International Labour Organization (ILO) “ranking Turkey third in the World for fatal work accidents”.

When similar news appeared last year related to the Soma accident, ILO released an official statement clarifying that such news did not reflect the truth. We hereby find it useful to once more draw the attention to the clarification below as a result of reappearance of similar news in the media:

The ILO never ranks countries on occupational safety and health (OSH) - whether it is Turkey or other countries. Since the ILO’s statistical database includes information on fatalities in the mining and quarrying industry that can be freely accessed by everyone on our website, we assume that the database was used to rank countries - including Turkey – by outside persons, who drew inaccurate conclusions and quoted ILO as a source.

The ILO underlines that making such comparisons may lead to misleading conclusions since the ILO database does not necessarily include all countries for various reasons (sometimes countries do not send figures or provide only partial figures, for instance).

Also, any serious comparison cannot be made by comparing absolute numbers. Any meaningful comparison would need to take into account additional elements, such as length of exposure, by relating data, for example, to the number of hours worked per year by the workforce in that sector during the year in question.

We kindly bring this issue into the attention of the press and media representatives as well as the public opinion that the above-mentioned clarification should be taken into account while referring to the ILO figures regarding the fatal work accidents.

The ILO mining specialist, Martin Hahn, can be contacted for any need for further details at: newsroom@ilo.org.