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	States’ Human Rights Obligations in the Context of Climate Change by Center for International Environmental Law   As governments and intergovernmental organizations have recognized, climate change has adverse impacts on a wide range of human rights. Consequently, States must uphold their existing human rights obligations defined under legally binding treaties in the context of climate change and climate policies.   These obligations require that climate policies effectively protect the rights of those most affected by the climate crisis and that States take preventive steps to avoid the most dangerous levels of temperature increase.   They also require that the design of these policies builds on the principles of non-discrimination and meaningful public participation.   Human rights treaty bodies (HRTBs) - established to monitor the implementation of the United Nations (UN) human rights treaties - have a critical role to play in further elaborating on the obligations of States to respect, protect, and fulfill human rights in the context of climate change.   For more than a decade, these bodies have provided many valuable recommendations to States illustrating the relevance of international human rights obligations in driving ambitious and just climate policies.   This Synthesis Note provides an overview of States' obligations under the different human rights instruments in the context of climate change, offering a compendium of the authoritative statements delivered by the human rights treaty bodies on these issues since 2008.   This Note contains three main sections: The first section reviews the role of the HRTBs in identifying and monitoring States' obligations in the context of climate change, the second appraises the authoritative guidance produced by these bodies in 2019 - including in comparison with relevant work accomplished by the HRTBs previously, and the third section provides a summary of their key statements addressing issues related to emissions reduction, adaptation to climate impacts, procedural rights, and international cooperation. http://bit.ly/2XmC2m6   http://www.ciel.org/press-room/ Visit the related web page
	Legal Experts Define a New Global Crime: ‘Ecocide’ by Stop Ecocide Foundation, agencies   A panel of 12 legal experts from around the world have released a proposed definition for a new international crime called “ecocide” covering “severe” and “widespread or long-term environmental damage” that would be prosecuted before the International Criminal Court in the Hague, alongside genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes and crimes of aggression.   The panel’s announcement was seen by environmentalists and international legal scholars as a significant step in a growing global campaign to criminalize ecocide, which requires one of the court’s 123 member nations to formally request consideration of a fifth crime within the court’s purview. The process could take years to complete.   “The four existing international crimes focus on the wellbeing of human individuals and groups …and rightly so,” Philippe Sands, the noted international human rights attorney and author who co-chaired the panel, said during a virtual press conference.   “We don’t in any way wish to diminish those vastly important crimes. But what is missing is a place for our natural world. None of the existing international criminal laws protect the environment as an end in itself, and that’s what the crime of ecocide does.”   While the United States, Russia, China and India, the world’s leading greenhouse gas polluters, are not members of the court and remain outside its jurisdiction, the legal scholars said the panel’s work will have effects at the tribunal and beyond, regardless of whether ecocide is officially made an international crime.   David J. Scheffer, a former U.S. ambassador at large for war crimes issues who led the U.S. delegation that negotiated the International Criminal Court’s founding treaty, known as the Rome Statute, said that drafting the definition “will heighten the issue of the environment for the court’s prosecutor, whether or not it’s ultimately adopted.”   “I think it is an essential exercise because environmental damage is growing phenomenally,” Scheffer said of the panel’s work.   If ultimately successful, legal scholars said the crime of ecocide could be used to hold the individuals most responsible for major ecological harms accountable, including business, insurance, financial and government leaders.   Even consideration of the crime, they said, could signal that mass environmental destruction is now considered one of the most morally reprehensible crimes in the world. A small but growing number of world leaders, including Pope Francis and French President Emmanuel Macron, have begun using the word “ecocide” to connote an offense they say poses a threat to humanity and remains beyond the reach of existing legal conventions.   Defining a Crime from Scratch   The panel was convened late last year by the Stop Ecocide Foundation, based in the Netherlands, with the hope that one of the International Criminal Court’s 123 member countries would submit its definition to the United Nations Secretary General, triggering a formal, multistep process towards amending the Rome Statute, which governs the court.   Senegalese lawyer Dior Fall Sow, alongside Sands, served as co-chair of the panel, which included Deputy Chairs Kate Mackintosh, executive director of the Promise Institute for Human Rights, UCLA School of Law, and Richard J, Rogers, a partner at Global Diligence and executive director of Climate Counsel (U.K.). Members included Alex Whiting, a former International Criminal Court prosecutions coordinator and professor at Harvard Law School, and Valérie Cabanes, an International jurist and human rights expert from France.   Crafting the definition was a necessary first step because, unlike the court’s other four crimes, ecocide has no international precedent, leaving the court’s member countries without a foundation in law to start the amendment process.   The 165-word definition begins: “For the purpose of this Statute, ‘ecocide’ means unlawful or wanton acts committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environment being caused by those acts.”   The panel defined “widespread” as “damage which extends beyond a limited geographic area, crosses state boundaries, or is suffered by an entire ecosystem or species or a large number of human beings.”   The panel wrote that “‘severe’ means damage which involves very serious adverse changes, disruption or harm to any element of the environment, including grave impacts on human life or natural, cultural or economic resources,” and defined “long-term” as “damage which is irreversible or which cannot be redressed through natural recovery within a reasonable period of time.”   Without a prior treaty or other legal precedent to work from, panelists had to construct the crime from scratch, ensuring it is sellable to the world’s nations, which are historically reluctant to cede sovereignty to international institutions.   “A perfect definition does you no good if states ignore it, or worse, become hostile to the enterprise and set the effort back,” said Nancy Combs, an expert in international criminal law and professor at William and Mary Law School. “If the panel’s calculations are wrong, the whole thing could go bust.”   The definition is aimed at being less of a sledgehammer and more of a guardrail for governments and businesses that are most responsible for ecological injuries.   “This is not about catching every single horror that occurs in relation to the environment, but those horrors that cross the threshold, and are of international concern,” Sands said. “And we hope that that approach comes up with something which is potentially effective, but not, if you like, so widespread in its effects that states run away and throw their arms up in horror.”   The definition also had to be general enough to address all manner of environmental harms, capable of keeping pace with evolving science, and specific enough to put would-be wrong doers on notice of what is and is not criminal behavior.   The six-month endeavor required close collaboration between international criminal lawyers and environmental lawyers, two specializations that until now have rarely intersected.   Notable for What it Doesn’t Include   But the new law differs in one major respect from the other four crimes prosecuted by the International Criminal Court: harm to human beings is not a prerequisite for ecocide. That shift away from an anthropocentric focus is a major development for international criminal law, which mainly focuses on human injuries, said Rogers, the co-deputy chair.   The definition is also notable for what it doesn’t include. The panel chose not to incorporate a list of ecocidal examples, such as the deforestation of the Amazon or the Chernobyl nuclear meltdown, for fear that something would inevitably be left out, possibly signaling that the excluded act may not qualify as ecocide. By leaving final determinations in the hands of the court’s judges, the panel’s definition is flexible enough to endure into the future when new forms of environmental destruction may emerge, the lawyers said.   That choice also had a political dimension. The panel did not want countries to feel they were being targeted in any way by listing examples. “We felt that it was best to keep that door shut,” Sands said.   But he did weigh in on climate change. “I’m loath to mention any particular examples, but the authorization, for example, in an industrialized country of a massive new coal field and a massive new coal fired power plant without properly taking into account impacts on the climate system, I think, could arguably come within this definition,” Sands said.   Whether acts that contribute to climate change qualify as ecocide likely will come down to whether they are also unlawful under other national or international laws, he added. The burgeoning body of climate change jurisprudence, including decisions from the Netherlands, France and Germany, holding governments accountable for their failure to adequately reduce greenhouse gas emissions, could take on new significance should the court’s member countries adopt the panel’s definition. “A failure to act is an act,” Sands said.   Scheffer called the panel’s definition an “impressive work product” and said it had “performed a great service to introduce a well-defined and pragmatic definition.”   Combs called the definition “very well-thought out” and said that it “clearly shows a deep knowledge and appreciation for the dual fields that inform it: international criminal law and environmental law.”   “I also think it does a nice job of balancing the need for the definition to have sufficient ‘teeth’ to have impact with the concomitant need to not scare off states’ parties,” she said.   * Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide - Commentary and Core Text: http://bit.ly/35O0WQl   http://www.stopecocide.earth/ http://insideclimatenews.org/news/22062021/ecocide-definition-panel-international-crime/ http://insideclimatenews.org/news/07042021/climate-crisis-ecocide-vanuatu-the-fifth-crime/ http://www.harmonywithnatureun.org/rightsOfNature/ http://www.harmonywithnatureun.org/ejInputs/ http://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/ http://www.ipcc.ch/reports/ http://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2017GL076521 http://www.ipbes.net/events/launch-ipbes-ipcc-co-sponsored-workshop-report-biodiversity-and-climate-change http://www.ipbes.net/pandemics http://www.ipbes.net/news/Media-Release-Global-Assessment Visit the related web page
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