Editor’s note: This story originally appeared on KCET.org and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.
Last fall, 16 children from across the world, including Greta Thunberg, filed a formal communication with the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child. Within the communication, the kids make the argument that their home nations — France, Germany, Brazil, Argentina and Turkey — haven’t done enough to adequately respond to climate change, and therefore haven’t protected their basic human rights. It’s been described in the press as everything from a petition to a lawsuit.
“It’s essentially a complaint similar to what you would file in a court here in the U.S.,” said Jeanette Bayoumi, an attorney with Hausfeld LLP, the New York-based law firm representing the 16 children.
“The children have told us that they see the future of the planet as one of the major issues facing them,” said UN Committee Chair Luis Pedernera, in a statement supporting the effort. But since then, the Committee hasn’t taken any action.
“Individual complaints need to be procedurally ready before treaty bodies can examine them,” explained Vivian Kwok, a public information officer in the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights. “This means that the round of observations and comments from the State parties needs to have concluded.”
While the complaint appears to have moved relatively slowly, it was filed at a time when young people across the world were making weekly headlines for skipping school and demonstrating on Fridays to call attention to impacts of climate change. Since then, the 16 petitioners named in the complaint, along with youth around the world, have continued organizing around climate justice despite mixed results and the unprecedented challenges facing them.
Last fall, two Alaska Native teenagers called on their Indigenous leadership to declare a climate change emergency in the northernmost U.S. state. To their dismay, little action has been taken since, despite the international attention, as the Trump Administration last month moved to overturn more than 60 years of protections for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and open the vast area to drilling.
On a more global stage last December, the Indigenous Climate Action Youth Delegation took their climate change action demands to Madrid for the UN’s Climate Change Conference (COP25) in Spain. “Within Indigenous organizations, it has been clear for decades youth must be involved [to] carry on the mantle and bring forth priorities and concerns on the international, national, regional and local scales,” said Ben Charles, an Alaska Native and emerging leader with the Inuit Circumpolar Council.
When the COVID-19 outbreak began sweeping the globe, much of that momentum came to a halt, though some say the movement already appeared to be losing traction. Charles said the pandemic has required him and the activists he works to be more flexible. “Everyone had various degrees of infrastructure access — internet and time zones — we have had various challenges.” And he admitted that slowed their progress. “Many of the larger items were set aside until we [can] meet physically,” but he said smaller efforts are still in motion.
As the coronavirus began to overshadow the youth climate change movement, the nations named in the UN complaint began to respond. France, Germany and Brazil argue that the authors failed to exhaust domestic remedies in their home nations, before filing the communication with the UN.
The countries argue that each of the children should have brought a case within each of their home countries and then taken those individual complaints all the way up to each nation’s supreme court. Only then could…
Read More: 16 children await UN decision as youth climate movement recalibrates | Earthbeat