10/20/2019 Legal modalities of Greta Thunberg's climate change strike before the United Nations.Read NowSwedish climate activist Greta Thunberg and 15 other young people from around the world have filed a human rights complaint against five countries for continuing to promote fossil fuels and failing to reduce carbon emissions. The group has asked the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) to recognize climate change as a children’s rights crisis and wants it to push those five countries—Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, and Turkey—to accelerate their action on climate change.
The petition was filed in New York on Monday to the CRC during the United Nations’ Climate Summit. The CRC monitors the implementation of the Convention on the Rights of the Child, a treaty that protects the human rights of children around the globe. It was signed by every country in the world, except the United States. Of those countries that signed, 45 of them agreed to allow children to petition the UN directly about treaty violations. Therefore, as a result of which, some of the world's other top greenhouse gas emitters are notably not named in the complaint. The United States -- which has contributed more global warming-inducing carbon dioxide to the atmosphere than any other country -- cannot be held in violation because it has not ratified the part of the treaty that allows children to seek justice for potential violations, and China, which currently emits more greenhouse gases than any other country, has also not signed onto that portion of the treaty. The young people, who range in age from 8 to 17, say that Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany, and Turkey have the highest greenhouse gas emissions among those 45 countries. They are each on a path that will result in planetary warming of between 3 and 4 degrees Celsius. They say none of the five will meet targets intended needed to keep the planet from heating to 1.5 or 2 degrees Celsius, as agreed to under the Paris Agreement. Petitioners say that they are already suffering from climate change-related impacts, including wildfires, floods, mental anxiety, drought, and threats to their traditional ways of life, such as reindeer herding or fishing. The CRC, which is made up of 18 independent child rights experts, primarily has two functions. First, it oversees the implementation of the convention by receiving reports every five years from participating countries outlining the steps taken to fulfill their obligations. Information is also gathered from NGOs and other sources to identify areas of concern. But the second, relatively new, the function of the committee permits an individual, or group of individuals, submit a communication arguing their rights have been violated. This “Optional Protocol” – adopted by the UN General Assembly in 2011 – is what Greta Thunberg and the 15 other children are using. However, there are several procedural and legal hurdles that must be cleared before the committee can address the substance of the issue. First, it must be determined if the communication is admissible, which includes whether the petitioners have exhausted the legal options in their home countries for addressing their concerns. But while Thunberg and her co-petitioners have not brought any actions in state or federal courts it may be the committee allows the matter to proceed anyway, since taking such action may have been “unreasonably prolonged or unlikely to bring effective relief”. Second, the committee must rule on the jurisdiction, as the obligations of the CRC only apply to each child within a country’s jurisdiction. Some of the petitioners meet this requirement by virtue of their nationality or residence, but the communication makes a broader claim: any child is within the jurisdiction of a country when its polluting activity impacts the rights of children, within or outside that country’s territory. This is a very significant claim: essentially, that carbon pollution leading to climate change violates the rights of children worldwide. Only once these hurdles are cleared will the committee investigate the substance of the complaints, proceed to a hearing, and make recommendations to any country responsible for the violation.
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