Clean environment could become U.N. human right
reuters.com
reuters.com
So it's basically about using one set of issues, which in substance are hard to fight, to weaken human rights as a whole. But it could just as easily have been about something else, like the "right to development", which has been pushed by authoritarian countries for years.
I'm pretty clueless when it comes to diplomacy. What is the drive for authoritarians? How do you negotiate with them, or otherwise limit their influence? (and is that desirable?).
Does anything the UN does matter? I don't mean that in a flippant/sarcastic way. The "teeth" of the UN is ostensibly the UN Security Council, which runs on vetoes by interests that are practically never aligned. It seems to provide cover for US policy, and when it can't serve that purpose the US does what it wants anyway either with NATO or by itself.
The stated point of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights is to prevent the need for constant Declarations of Independence through violent revolution.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/righttod...
The history is that western democracies generally emphasized civil rights while poorer countries social rights. This “evened the playing field” to play off rights against each other. For example one can claim that it’s been necessary to to limit certain civil rights to improve the situation of social rights. (Take away the farms and give them to the workers).
Why not just adopt the damn land value tax or just do plain old ground leases? Come on. Why does everything have to be solved with some stupid repossession thing where people get free shit that they don't want to take care of?
How about a right to live in a community free of external interference—a stronger version of the right to self-determination? You could argue that it would prevent acts of external aggression, but it could also be used to prevent aid when a nation's people are being oppressed.
Procedurally, I mean. Presumably the same mechanisms used to vote for/against this could be used to prevent terrible people from pushing for terrible things?
Now the question of a slippery slope could be that with a right to clean environment developed nations could stifle growth and innovation in developing nations citing clean environment worries (maybe Nigeria and oil). This could go way deeper than oil however as any country trying to harvest any sort of natural resource can face scrutiny and potential action. In an extreme example developed nations could then say 'we will mine these resources because we can do it less intensively' robbing nations of potential nation building revenue. How would you combat this? Maybe a 'right to develop' and boom rights dilution and authoritative in nature. Perhaps am extreme example but extreme isn't too far with people involved.
As things stand, what this decision does is make it look like the UK has a vested interest in polluting the world, which makes exactly 0 sense to me from a foreign policy POV: this is not something countries want to look like they stand for.
Hence my asking, I just can't make the decision or the arguments behind it make sense?
The UN is a diplomatic discussion forum and place to organize joint projects. It's an anarchy, not a not a government.
Does this mean no new human right can ever be established? And by extension, that the set of human rights currently in the UDHR are "complete"?
(I don't have a strong opinion yet, just found this framing curious...)
I believe the part about authoritarians trying to trojan horse bills that erode our rights disguised as unobjectionable bills. We see it all the time with bills that restrict our right to privacy disguised as anti-child porn legislation. People who come out in favor of the 4th amendment are painted as vile criminals.
That said, I don't see how it works in this instance. Care to elaborate?
Authoritarian country criticizes democracies for environmental “crimes” which violates human rights. Says they have no right to criticize since they also violate human rights.
Massive whatsboutism that detracts from the important issues.
He complains to the authorities that you fly on a jet a few times a year, contributing to climate change. He never flies, you see (because he can't afford it).
He promises to stop beating his children once you stop flying.
The authorities are forced to admit that this is a fair proposal, as both beating children and flying on jets are violations of human rights. No deal is struck, you continue flying on jets, he continues beating his children, knowing that what little leverage the neighborhood had over him has been lost.
That aside, whoever speaks second appears to be the one accused of engaging in whataboutism. Just make the neighbor complain first, and then you're the one doing a whataboutism.
Both of those aside, the authorities aren't forced to conflate two separate issues and begrudgingly support the status quo. Both can and should have consequences.
It occurs to me that this same argument can be used against anything that ought to be enshrined at the UN as a human right. An obvious example being loving who you want without regard to sex or gender.
What’s the fundamental human right? Shouldn’t we be worried that these so-called human rights are being newly discovered relatively recently?
"Who" implies a human. The topic is human rights. I'm not sure I follow what this particular question is trying to get at.
> Why is it linked to sex or gender?
Pro answer: It isn't. We've known this since prehistoric times.
Con answer: Because only a man and a woman can create a new human life on their own.
> Is this a singular love or is polygamy a human right?
Age differences would have made for a better example here. But my answer would be that this question is that it frankly doesn't matter for my example. I.e., one does not need to answer the question of "how many people should we allow someone to marry" to answer the question of "should people be allowed to marry someone with the same genitals as themselves". Indeed, our global reality reflects that.
> What’s the fundamental human right?
What I previously stated: "loving who you want without regard to sex or gender". Notice that it does not say "without regard to singular vs plural love" or "without regard to reciprocation" or anything else.
> Shouldn’t we be worried that these so-called human rights are being newly discovered relatively recently?
That's... how it works.
We (or at least Western society) don't enshrine rights into laws and constitutions until we realize something we ought to be allowed to do freely is being unduly infringed upon. That's a process that doesn't stop.
We should be worried when we stop "discovering" new rights, not the other way around. Humanity has yet to produce a generation that "has it all figured out" with respect to fundamental rights, and there is no reason to assume we ever will.
We should be worried about certain societies “discovering” new rights and attempting to impose them on the rest of the world who may or may not share that viewpoint. This is true of “enlightened” societies like in the West just as much as other societies.
Is this a joke? If there is no issue with the resolution itself, then we for sure should accept it.
You mean sorta like... the past 50 years or so?
I’m also very confused about this line about halfway down the article:
> The United States is not currently a Council member but is vying for a seat and can still join debates as an observer.
Are they saying that the US isn’t even a voting member of the council making the decision? It seems like a huge exaggeration to say the US is interfering with the resolution when they’re not even voting yes or no on it.
> They mention legal concerns from Washington but don’t explain them for some reason.
Odds are they haven't actually been spelled out because they amount to "it'll cause huge disruptions to business because they'll all suddenly be suable for their decades of environmental damages". The government is maximally vague on these things so it's harder to actually refute.
That's not correct. The general assembly can adopt resolutions and is meant to adopt resolutions by itself. Those resolutions are non-binding however.
The security council needs to agree if the resolution touches on security relevant topics. And the security council is the only UN organ that can issue binding resolutions.
China has also spent a lot of time pouring loans and projects (often extractive) into small poor countries through Belt and Roads giving them a fair amount of power in the general assembly because each country gets a single vote in the GA.
The fact that there's nobody to provide it, doesn't mean that it's not a basic human right.
[0] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
The UDHR is an aspirational document that has no legal force in and of itself.
The declaration on human rights is not really government-centric, so the US-style free speech comparison makes little sense.
> what do they really mean?
They're a yardstick to measure how well we as humanity, and, more specifically particular regions or systems, measure up to what we, as humanity, consider to be the things that every human should (expect to) have. (Sorry for the bombasity.)
For instance, if we lived in a libertarian/anarchist utopia, with no government, it would still make sense to ask whether people's human rights were being met.
Look at the debate around making Internet access a right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access
Same debate around free healthcare et al, which last time I checked somebody had to provide.
One could argue that the desire for an increased level of comfort of one set of people should not happen at the detriment of the right to clean water, for example, of another set of people. Many countries will have their own standards, or their own double-standards. I think it's a very relevant debate.
Hypothetically, what happens in a drought, when there is no water for anyone? Have your rights been violated? If so, by whom?
If it's rather described as a right to nondiscrimination in the distribution of clean water (with respect to some set of properties, which could include wealth or ability to pay, but likely couldn't include large-scale geographic location due to distribution logistics), then that actually starts to make sense and can be realistically debated.
Not trying to deflect, just disagreeing with the OP's comment that such debates are BS.
If the government had a reasonable way of preventing that and didn't, I'd say yes. Otherwise, no.
> If so, by whom?
By whoever was in charge of maintaining your water supply (government again), or nobody if this wasn't doable.
A government violates your rights when it fails to take action to protect them.
I know this isn't part of the Bill of Rights, but the idea that humans have a right to life isn't very controversial. If there were a situation where the water ran out in an isolated town, and the local government had a big water tower with enough clean drinking water for everyone, we'd absolutely say the people have a "right" to that water.
There are fringe cases, sure, but if people are going to literally die without a thing, and the government has the capacity to provide it, and the government is actually "by the people, of the, people for the people," I think the people have a right to that thing by extension.
I don't understand the short-term, anti-growth thinking that has taken hold in recent years (we have been there before with forecasts of impending doom, of course).
Do the various statements, proposals, and policies make more sense?
(Of course, this is the problem with the traditional synechdoche of a country name for the policy of one particular government at one particular point of time...)
Not compared to the U.N.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toxic_Substances_Control_Act_o...
Totally makes sense to me really. It's just enables genocidal dictatorships to go full "what about" when called out for their crimes. Yes, we just exterminated a small nation, but look how much U.S. companies pollute!
That already happens, and it already doesn’t stop sanctions and other consequences, from my limited understanding of geopolitics.
The UN would be doing the same thing if this context were to become real. Nobody will be inspecting China, Russia or 37 other dictatorships for environmental human rights abuses.
Because you know the exact thing you're afraid of has actually been done in the name of civil liberties and political rights, how many small nations have been crushed in the name of freedom and democracy in the last half century?
To an extent, you can – obviously not by buying carbon credits, though. Doing things that actually improve (or, reduce less slowly) the living conditions of humans is comparable to poor living conditions of humans.
At least with ecological concerns you can make the case that it is the base layer for all organic life on earth, you can live unfree but you can't live without a biosphere, I actually think it would make some sense for universal human rights to reflect that order of priorities. Recognizing our shared biological reality might be an easier sell for a universal rights framework than some liberal political rights not even shared by a majority of people on the planet.
The UN is a joke. Something should be done.
That is the way the UN was originally set up. The UN has no instruments of its own to enforce anything.
We wouldn't think it reasonable if someone on trial for embezzlement asked the jury to acquit because there are other people out in the world committing murder.
We only put up with it in news and politics because we have normalized and accepted propaganda.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/russia-mig-31-...
US does these things, its just not highlighted front page material in American press when it happens, so it goes unnoticed to American populations unlike when adversaries like Russia fly bombers near Alaska.
Also US conducted similar maneuvers as what China did to Taiwan but to Iraq preceeding the Iraq invasion.
https://mobile.twitter.com/MoNDefense/status/144397595657879...
This was a routine Chinese air patrol that got propagandized by the US.
It is. Because it is one of the biggest threats to human rights and to a clean environment. If UN can't tackle China, they are feckless, but of course we all know this. This is a stick to beat the west with while China and Russia and the new axis of evil get to keep running rough-shot over the rest of the world.
So China just almost caught up to Europe as far as CO2 emissions per capita goes and is nowhere close to the US whilst putting measures to reverse the trend. That comparison used to be ridiculous just a few decades ago when they were comparatively massively underdeveloped.
Often this involves the whole blame-shifting where one poses one shouldn't do anything because there's someone doing less/worse. But in this case it's not even true. Not even if they lied about their numbers by
I said clean environment. Not sure why you are changing the subject, but lets see:
https://ourworldindata.org/plastic-pollution#top-20-river-so...
> Geographically we see that the majority of the most polluting rivers are located in Asia. River Yangtze, the top polluting river, had an input of approximately 333,000 tonnes in 2015 — over 4 percent of annual ocean plastic pollution.
> Often this involves the whole blame-shifting
Okay but then just don't shift the blame from countries that threatens a clean environment to countries that do not.
7 billion people in the world and they should all be ruled by a bunch of bureaucrats???
I hope that day never comes.
For WTO, no army is going to invade because you didn’t remove tariffs.
It's just as relevant as your comment.
I had to ctrl+shift+F the webpage to see if I missed something on the Reuters article relating to China.
What does Chinese policy on human rights have anything to do with the above mentioned article?
Also, the US already has stronger rules against vehicle pollution than the EU (in terms of pollution that directly damage health like NOx and PM). If it's going to become a "human right" then countries who propose it should be leading it in the first place.
The whole US or only same states?
To be fair the amount of Diesel cars on the road in the EU with abhorrently poor emission systems is shocking; I was at VW during dieselgate, and worked with Bosch and VW during the buy-back program and VW are by far the only violators in the EU and in the periphery countries for lacking emission standards.
I was behind mid 2010s diesel Opel for ~35km on my way to Slovenia and I have been in enclosed green houses with diesel tractors so I'm pretty sensitive to it, and it was so absurd that such a thing was allowed on the road.
Typical check engine light failures (P14X/0420) are susceptible to modifications to pass if you know what you are doing, visual inspection isn't always as stringent as you'd think even with the STAR test sites in CA, which has the strictest emission laws in the World. When I was in motorsports we had a series of people we could rely on to pass our respective track-built machines on the road, but ultimately you realize that it's not worth the time, resources or risk and that the car (if properly built) no longer belongs on the road anyway.
As an environmentalist who has struggled with addictions to 'car-caine' I've since downsized from a revolving inventory of 5-6 cars, and 3 motorcycles to one of each: what I think is even tougher is to actually make sensible policy and regulation regarding them without it being simply a way induce needless consumption.
Case in point is the absurd World of the 2-3rd Gen Prius used car market and the catalytic converters, which has always had a lot of theft since it was released but have reached an Worldwide [0] extreme this year due to the astronomical rise in PM prices for those metals (inflationary pressure more than demand) so coupled with the supply chain shortages from Toyota and the rise in sudden demand many cars which were in compliance and within emission specs were simply scrapped because when Toyota couldn't deliver there was no other certified manufacturer for the part and something as simple not having a Toyota stamp was an automatic failure.
Even though some owners reported emission testing within spec of counties within WA or OR which have less stringent standards than CA but still worth noting their compliance. Their insurance policies payout wouldn't cover a similar ranged car purchase and the only alternative was to sell it out of state and use that sum (usually half the cost of properly registered Prius in CA) and to buy another used one.
0: https://www.hotcars.com/heres-why-prius-catalytic-converter-...
For all of the rhetoric, I'd have thought the issue was more strenuously regulated.
One thing it does is to buttress the fictive sovereignty of all these hundreds of "nations" which are not actually sovereign or independent, but enjoy promoting the notion that they are out of the belief that it makes the citizens more spirited. If the people believe that the 'new boss' is the people, rather than the 'same boss as the old boss,' they're less likely to revolt or otherwise be demoralized. That's the theory, but it's one of those things where the people who are supposed to 'get the joke' no longer get the joke, so it leads to a lot of confusion and muddled thinking on the topic.
The moment that any "nation" asserts sovereignty independent of the 'international community,' the fiction is exposed. There are only a small number of countries actually capable of asserting sovereignty and the US is one of them, China's another.
That is, for example, the Beijing smog, well those countries own a fair percentage of that. Off-shoring manufacturing isn't only about cost of labour. It's also about less (environmental) regulation.
The USA is fond of highlighting it's progress on the environment, but it consistently fails to mention the problem wasn't solved, but most often simply off-shore'd. We also love to present as taking the high road on human rights. Something like this would ruin that (false*) narrative.
* The USA's incarceration rate comes to mind.
Right, so one of the consequences would be that the US gives a bunch of activists permission to use the legal system to harass anything that they like — not just new projects, but everything that exists in the world. Perhaps we could go all Keystone XL on some Google data center for polluting the world with CO2 and global warming. You don't even need to believe in the cause, you just need to hate Google.
Meanwhile nations like China spewing godawful particulates all over Shanghai will surely WILL FOLLOW THE SPIRIT OF THE LAW AND ALLOW THE LITTLE GUY TO SPEAK UP AGAINST THE ABUSES OF THEIR STATE RUN INDUSTRY. Mmmhmm.
it's all stupid power games in the end, and this is NOT an effective way to get kids out of the NYCHA apartments slathered with lead paint (to use a local example)
Nihilism is a good way to justify acting against the common good, which is exactly why we need more drastic positive action against climate change. China will do what it’s gonna do, but we can choose a better path for ourselves.
After China stopped accepting plastic waste, we discovered that almost all of the developed nations weren't actually recycling plastic but in reality just dumping it in developing countries. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/may/28/treated-...
The simple truth is that developed countries aren't exactly following the laws we put into place ourselves when it turns out they inconvenience us.
I am disgusted by human rights demands only from China but not from "US partners" that are doing maybe even worse (like not offering equal rights for women or killing gay people with stones). I would have more respect if you equally condemn everyone or just shut up and fix your local issues .
https://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?a...
The article makes no mention of China, I'm wondering where this idea is coming from? Can you have a good faith discussion about anything political without going so far out of your way to smear the DPRC? Is it possible to accept responsibility without pointing fingers at others?
The DPRC has only been an industrial power for the past 30-40 years, 70+ years after the western industrial boom - Western nations had already put astronauts/cosmonauts in space. If you feel your country isn't accountable for anything, then argue your point because this finger pointing isn't helping anyone nor is it interesting.