The protesters jumped from small boats to the hull of the 44-year-old Clemenceau, kept in the Mediterranean port of Toulon after being mothballed in 1997, and climbed up a crane on the ship, from where they unfurled a banner reading: “Asbestos carrier: not here, nor elsewhere”.

Greenpeace said it organised the stunt to call attention to the carcinogenic danger posed by the vessel and to call on the French government to remove the asbestos itself instead of sending the carrier to India.

“It is clear that the government is unable today to manage the decommissioning of its military and merchant ships. We ask that the government start a national strategy of dismantling them that observes international law, human rights and the environment,” said the head of Greenpeace France, Pascal Husting.

A spokesman for the Toulon coast guard, Emmanuel Dinh, said the protest lasted less than an hour.

The French government intends to send the Clemenceau to India to be broken down into 22,000 tonnes of scrap metal.

Although some of the asebestos insulation has been removed, Greenpeace and an anti-asbestos group, the Jussieu Committee, say the bulk of the 210 tonnes of the dangerous fireproofing remains.

“Decontamination is very expensive and so the easiest thing to do is to send it to other countries where labour laws can be easily flouted,” said activist Madhumita Dutta of pressure group Corporate Accountability Desk.

Dutta said in a statement released in New Delhi that India did not have the proper technology, equipment or procedures in place to handle the decontamination of the Clemenceau.

“The workers use the most unsophisticated methods to break the ship down. Even one fibre of asbestos can cause serious medical problems,” she said.

To highlight the human and environmental costs of shipbreaking, Greenpeace has also published a report titled End of Life Ships, which highlights poor working conditions at shipbreaking yards all over the world.

“India, Bangladesh, Pakistan, China and Turkey are the homes to the world’s shipbreaking facilities,” said the report.

“Every year the shipping industry sends around 600 ships of all types to be dismantled on their beaches. The yards provide work, directly or indirectly, to thousands of people. Yet working at a shipbreaking yard is a dirty and dangerous job.”

Almost half of the world’s ships end up in India – which has the world’s biggest shipbreaking yard – for dismantling after their sailing lives are over, according to Greenpeace.

India was selected as its destination for the process after a Spanish company which won the original decommissioning tender in 2003 tried to send the ship to Turkey to have its asbestos stripped out, in contravention of EU law.

That contract was rescinded and the French defence ministry decided to do some of the decontamination work itself before sending the ship to India.

The Clemenceau, which took part in the 1991 Gulf War, was taken out of service when it was superseded by France’s new, nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle.