James Shaw’s New Zealand Bill of Rights (Right to Sustainable Environment) Amendment Bill appears in Parliament’s order paper today. It is well down the list so I expect that it will take some time to reach, probably months although there is talk about it being reached today.
The bill on the face of it is quite simple. If passed it would amend the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act to provide that “[e]veryone has the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment”.
And who could disagree with this? Because all other recognised rights will be severely compromised if the environment collapses. Your right not to be deprived of life will be severely affected. Your right to not be subject to torture or cruel treatment would be worthless as a collapsing environment inflicted the cruellest of treatments possible.
Freedom of thought, conscience and religion would be mostly irrelevant as survival became more and more important. The extreme control measures that are likely will make freedom of expression and of peaceable assembly, association and movement nice to haves. And they would all but ensure that rights of liberty, not to be arbitrarily detained and to be subject to minimum standards of criminal procedure would become luxuries we could not afford.
Clearly our civilisation is completely reliant on having a sustainable environment. And if our environment fails then fundamental human rights will surely follow.
The European Court of Human Rights understands this. A recent decision to a case brought by some senior women living in Switzerland ruled that their rights to a family life had been breached by the changing climate and that that the Swiss authorities had not acted in time to come up with a good enough strategy to cut emissions.
From the Guardian:
Weak government climate policies violate fundamental human rights, the European court of human rights has ruled.
In a landmark decision on one of three major climate cases, the first such rulings by an international court, the ECHR raised judicial pressure on governments to stop filling the atmosphere with gases that make extreme weather more violent.
The court’s top bench ruled that Switzerland had violated the rights of a group of older Swiss women to family life, but threw out a French mayor’s case against France and that of a group of young Portuguese people against 32 European countries.
This last case failed because the court ruled the young people who are Portuguese did not have standing to bring the case against other EU nations and needed to firstly bring their claim before the Portuguese courts.
But the implications of the decision are clear. Again from the Guardian:
Joie Chowdhury, an attorney at the Centre for International Environmental Law campaign group, said the judgment left no doubt that the climate crisis was a human rights crisis. “We expect this ruling to influence climate action and climate litigation across Europe and far beyond,” she said.
This case has a New Zealand equivalent where Northland Kaumatua has sued the seven big polluters arguing that their role in producing climate change had caused him loss. The Supreme Court has ruled that the case can proceed to a full trial and overturned a lower court ruling that the case be struck out on the basis Mr Smith had no reasonable cause of action.
Mr Smith still has to establish his claim. But the Court’s ruling that his claim is viable will put the polluters under some pressure.
The case has its critics. The Head of the New Zealand Initiative thinks that the decision is evidence that the Supreme Court is an activist court. When it comes to climate change give me a Court that will tell the Government it is breaching fundamental rights by not protecting the environment any time.
If Shaw’s amendment was passed claims against polluters would have even greater viability.
I hope the bill passes so that the most fundamental human right, to ensure that our grandchildren have a viable environment to live in, is protected. But I suspect that working towards a sustainable environment will not be something this Goverment will be prepared to commit to and that we will need to rely on the Courts to achieve this.
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