Global Climate Change

Baroness Kennedy of Shaws Excerpts

Thursday 29th October 2015 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Kennedy of The Shaws (Lab)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Lord, Lord Hunt, for initiating this debate, which is so timely. I should also say that I chair the International Bar Association’s Human Rights Institute, and recently I was invited to co-chair a working party on climate change and human rights. We reported last October and the report is now the subject of international debate and is being used by the United Nations in preparation for the Paris talks.

Climate change is one of those cross-border issues that presents serious challenges to all nations, so requires multinational responses. It is just like international terrorism or international trafficking of people or indeed any of those things that crosses borders. We need to have collective responses and, as the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, described, we need an international framework in which nations and national legal systems then act. It is important to recognise that—just as the noble Lord, Lord Stern, was saying, about the UK being very good at research and development and good in leading the way in so many areas—the UK is also very good at law. We have led the world, particularly in areas of law which we sometimes shy away from. We have led the way on human rights but we have also led the way in commercial law. People look to the United Kingdom courts and the arbitration system that we have set up to deal with disputes which cross borders. That has made international markets and globalisation possible. We should learn from commercial law that, where there is the political will to make things work, it can work. We really have to develop the political will around this issue to see the role that law can play.

Many serious human rights issues come out of all this. There is the right to life—indeed, the noble Lord, Lord Prescott, referred to it—which covers all the things that we know are necessary for a real human existence. There is the right to shelter, food, clean water and so on. People in the poor world, in particular, suffer from the changes that we see taking place. Sitting on that commission, looking at climate change, we really had to be persuaded by the signs. People who are in denial on this really have to get to grips with what the scientists of our world are telling us.

As the noble Lord, Lord Stern, said, people in low-lying regions, such as the Maldives and Bangladesh, are seeing their oceans rising and are living in fear of the consequences of the melting polar caps. People everywhere living on the water’s edges whose livelihood comes from fishing and so on are seeing those livelihoods destroyed. Indeed, we see the consequences of aridity and desertification of whole stretches of our land mass, and the effect of that on people’s lives. What people do is move. Yearning to survive means that people get moving, so having been alarmed by the sight of refugees on the Mediterranean drowning, we will see much, much more of that in our world as this problem increases. I do not think that we should allow those who are dismissive to seek to control of any part of this debate.

Our report was published and one of the things that we said, as lawyers entering this arena, was that we should develop the arbitration system internationally, just as we have done in commercial law, to deal with those cross-border issues that will arise almost of necessity. I want to ask the Government whether they have taken note of a case that has just been decided in June in the Netherlands where a citizens’ organisation got together. Under an NGO called Urgenda—obviously accepting the notion that this was an agenda that had some urgency attached to it—it brought a case against the Dutch Government saying that they had failed to reach the targets to which they had committed and had a duty to protect. It invoked tort and human rights law and this case was won by a three-judge court, deciding that the state has responsibilities to protect. Indeed, national law can be invoked within that international human rights framework. It has implications for all of us, because you can be sure that activists the world over on this issue will be bringing cases against their nation state. We are likely to see it here; the Government should be alert to that. I hope they will recognise that turning to law should be a last resort. We should be leading the way on all this.

I urge the Government to look at the report from the International Bar Association. It is highly measured—lawyers on the whole do not tend to be very radical. However, one of its suggestions—on which it has sponsored work that is now being done—is to create a model statute, to be drawn down by nation states, to turn international commitments into national law. Rather like our own Climate Change Act, this will ensure consistency of law internationally and that nation states can be held accountable for their commitments.

There is inevitably a role for law in all this. When discussions take place in Paris, I hope that Britain—which has such a proud legal record—will lead them and will argue for a commitment across nations, bound by an international framework, to draw down laws that call Governments to account.