Climate change activists have lost the public debate and now seek to push their radical agenda outside of democratic processes.
The International Bar Association report into "Achieving Justice and Human Rights in an Era of Climate Disruption" is the most recent example of this new war on democracy. The report was presented this week at the IBA's annual conference in Tokyo.
It sets out a deep green, leftist agenda, demanding action to bring about "climate justice".
The recommendations of the IBA Climate Change Justice and Human Rights Taskforce Report include the adoption of a "human right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment", the creation of a new international environmental court and for trade agreements to favour environmental objectives over economic ones.
Of course, there is no such thing as a human right to a "safe environment". But the IBA thinks one should be made up.
It is a hopelessly flawed and dangerous concept. Human rights are not a means of achieving political ends. They represent the ideas at the heart of individual human liberty.
Yet the IBA report makes an explicit argument for the creation of a new human right in pursuit of a nakedly political objective. As if they can be simply plucked from the air. But human rights are static. They don't change with the political fads of the day.
And that's the great strength of human rights. As fixed protections of the most basic human freedoms — freedom of speech, freedom of association, freedom of thought and conscience and religion — they don't discriminate and they don't confer privilege.
But the IBA wants to change all of that.
On page four of the report the authors reveal their intentions by explaining: "The global response to (climate change) has to date largely been conducted under the auspices of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and its implementing mechanism, the Kyoto Protocol. Every year, States Parties to both treaties meet with a view to progressing negotiations, though success has proved famously elusive."
In other words, the democratic process (such that it is) hasn't yielded the results the IBA wants. So now it's time to override democracy. It's time for the lawyers and judges to step in.
The recommendations to create a human right to a "safe environment" and a new court to adjudicate disputes brought under this shiny new cause of action are the key proposals in the IBA report. They would allow individuals and groups like Greenpeace to sue democratically elected governments under the new international legal regime.
Implementing these proposals would represent the wholesale transfer of environmental policy from the democratic realm to the legal realm. It would replace debate with litigation.
Perhaps this is exactly what we should expect from a body populated by lawyers and judges. The regime would create a potentially significant amount of work for international and human rights lawyers (including many of the authors of the report).
But lawyers have a duty to uphold legal traditions and to respect the rule of law.
And this means recognising limitations of the law and the importance of distinct boundaries between legal and political spheres. Two Australians are members of the taskforce responsible for the report — Chief Justice Brian Preston of the NSW Land and Environment Court and Professor Jane McAdam of the University of NSW.
Preston seems oblivious to the fact that the report presents as a strategy document for a radical Left overhaul of the legal system. As he explained on these pages earlier this month: "In our early discussions we were trying to ensure we did not take a particular viewpoint aligning ourselves with one sort of faction or another."
It's unclear what happened by the time the later talks took place because the bias of the report couldn't be clearer.
At this point there are a couple of things that must occur. First, the recommendations contained within the IBA report should be completely rejected by the commonwealth government, on grounds that they are anti-democratic and economically destructive. Second, the IBA should desist from further promotion of any particular political agenda.
If the IBA or anyone else is truly interested in justice for the world's poor it should heed the wise words of Stephen Galilee, CEO of the NSW Minerals Council, who made the point that "justice for the world's vulnerable must also include access to the cheap and reliable energy that can lift them out of poverty."
Of course this isn't what green activists want to hear. But thankfully it's a truth of which prime minister Tony Abbott is keenly aware.
As he sensibly noted last week: "Coal is good for humanity, coal is good for prosperity, coal is an essential part of our economic future, here in Australia, and right around the world."
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