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Climate Justice Programme
Dozens of organisations and lawyers have joined together to form the international and collaborative Climate Justice Programme (CJP), including Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, WWF and Germanwatch. It supports enforcement of the law around the world in a campaigning context to combat climate change and associated human rights abuses, in the run-up to the start in 2005 of official negotiations to make further cuts in greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol.
This is a new and dramatic response to climate change, which gives people the ability to use legal rights to seek redress, to protect their lives and livelihoods and to send a clear message that they are not passive victims but players on the political stage whose concerns must be respected and taken seriously.
As the science strengthens [1], so must the law respond. For example, it is illegal under international law for one State to cause harm to another State. It is illegal under domestic law in many countries for polluters to cause nuisances to the public and to market defective products, and damages must be paid. International and domestic laws prohibit human rights violations. Domestic laws impose duties on directors of bodies, such as insurance companies or pension funds, to act in the best interests of shareholders who may suffer financial harm as a result of climate impacts. If these, and other laws are enforced now, all over the world, they can help combat climate change and ensure that the necessary cuts in greenhouse gas emissions are made.
Legal developments:
Climate science has now reached a stage of legal significance, and twice in 2003 this was accepted by the US courts for the first time [2].
Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace
and affected individuals have been joined by the cities of Boulder, Oakland
and Arcata in suing the US export credit agencies for funding fossil fuel
projects under the National Environment Policy Act.
http://www.climatelawsuit.org
Twelve US states, several cities, and over a dozen environmental groups have joined forces to challenge the unprecedented ruling by the Environmental Protection Agency rejecting the agency's longstanding jurisdiction under the Clean Air Act to regulate global warming emissions. The states, cities and groups challenged the EPA decision in the Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. http://www.climatelaw.org/media/states.challenge.bush
Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Chair of the
Inuit Circumpolar Conference (ICC), announces in December 2003 that the
ICC is considering filing a claim with the Inter-American Commission on
Human Rights against the United States for the harm global warming is causing
to the Inuit. The claim, if filed, will aver that, by failing to
curtail its greenhouse gas emissions, the United States has violated the
Inuit’s human rights, including their rights to property, culture, and
subsistence.
http://www.inuit.org/index.asp?lang=eng&num=244
In Australia, lawyers have notified
directors of selected Australian companies of the financial risks that
climate change presents to their companies, and of their legal obligations
to deal with those risks appropriately.
http://www.climatelaw.org/media/acjp.launch
Initiatives are also being considered
in several other countries. For more information, see http://www.climatelaw.org.
CJP in the news
Endnotes