The Commission will examine the urgent need for progressive lawyers to act to save the planet from corporate greed and governmental complicity. Our children are under threat: not just a threat to the quality of their lives but to their right to life itself. From the Arctic Circle to Equatorial rain forests and polluted seas and oceans, everywhere we look, the big CO2 producers and other TNCs, in league with corrupt politicians, are devastating our planet: in Fukushima, the Niger Delta, Bhopal, the Gulf of Mexico, the Barrier Reef of Australia, the Tar Sands of Canada. By the time we get to Brussels, this list will be even longer. This is not a static threat. It is growing rapidly, as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirmed as recently as September 2013. In past decades, faced with the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation, IADL took the lead in calling for nuclear weapons to be outlawed. Today, progressive lawyers are increasingly lending their skills to the peoples’ struggle to demand the human right to a clean and healthy environment. This demand goes hand in hand with the human right to health care: for Bangladeshi garment workers, for miners in China or asbestos workers in Italy; for the right to affordable retroviral drugs in Africa. Progressive lawyers must fight for the human right to health against the rapacious greed of Big Pharma and the destructive impact of “austerity measures.” This fight includes challenging the impunity of TNCs for destroying the health of successive generations in Bhopal, Fukushima and, in Vietnam, through Agent Orange. The United Nations itself must be compelled to compensate the people of Haiti for the suffering caused by its reckless introduction of cholera into that shockingly deprived country. The Commission will examine the role for peoples’ lawyers in:

1. Holding extractive industries to account for environmental threats (e.g., deep sea oil drilling, fracking, asbestos mining);

2. Challenging the Big CO2 Producers for endangering the health and sustainability of peoples (cf. Big Tobacco lawsuits);

3. Defending the right to bear witness to environmental threats;

4. Upholding the right of peoples to health care;

5. Demanding reparations for victims such as those of Bhopal, Fukushima, Vietnam and the Haitian cholera epidemic;

6. Making polluters pay and enforcing the precautionary principle under international environmental law.

 

Nous y présentons une publication collective préparée par Prisca Merz, Valérie Cabanes et Emilie Gaillard téléchargeable ci-dessous:

Ending Ecocide – the next necessary step in international law