Implementig Intergenerational Justice

Last week, a colleague of mine, Marisa dos Reis, organised an international scientific conference on the legal implementation of the rights of future generations on the premises of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, Portugal. It was the perfect excuse to put the doctoral thesis beside for a moment and board a plane to (reputedly) warmer regions. We had some bad luck with the weather, but let me get to the point of this posting.

There are a host of contemporary problems that directly affect today's children and tomorrows yet unborn people. They include the global financial and economic crisis, the depletion of natural resources, environmental degradation, conflicts and most notably global climate change. Most of these problems were not heard of only a hundred years ago. Of course there have always been financial and economic crises (1920's!) but until recently humankind just didn't have the technological means to alter our environment in a way that shapes the fate of generations to come. Even if the old Greeks or the Holy Roman Empire would have wanted to, they could not have destroyed or severly damaged the environment in a way that would have affected generations born 100 years later. Even the forest clearance on the Iberian Peninsula, one of the most obvious historical examples for human influence on the environment, was done in the course of many generations. Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Portuguese and Spaniards cut the trees down in the course of the centuries to build their fleets, creating the arid climate on the peninsula we know today. But our generation can wipe out the world in a blink of the eye with nuclear weapons.

The problems are thus more pressing than ever. Yet, future generations are difficult to protect against damages through law. This is true even if they are caused knowingly through massive neglect as is undoubtedly the case with climate change. Unborn people do not have legal standing in the traditional sense. Additionally, laws stretching far into the future might clash with the principles of the rule of law, most notably the principle of clarity. But still, politicians on national and international levels always refer to future generations, their rights and the need to protect them. Are these only phrases? Future generations and their rights are named in the preambles of the UN Charter and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court. They are mentioned by the Brundtland Commission, by the Stockholm Declaration on the Environment, by the Rio Declaration in 1992 and the UNESCO Decleration on the Responsibilities of the Present Generations towards Future Generations, to name just a few.

So, apart from visiting beautiful Lisbon, it's restaurants and bars and the marvelous towns in the vincinity (Cascais and Sintra a really worth a visit), there was a major question to deal with. The objective of the conference was to elaborate whether the numerous declarations of safeguarding the rights of future generations can be put into practice despite the problems they confront legal practitioners with. International speakers from the fields of philosophy and all sub-fields of law came together in Lisbon to discuss possible ways of implementing these rights on the national, European and international levels.
Many interesting approaches were intorduced at the conference. Emilie Gaillard Sebileau from the University of Orléans presented possibilities how the problem of rights of future people could be solved in French national law. Lucy Stone from UNICEF UK explained how safeguarding children's rights may be a feasible approach to protect the rights of future generations. Maja Göpel from the World Future Council presented a possibility of including the rights of future generations in the Lisbon Treaty of the EU and Sebastien Jodoin from the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law presented a draft code of criminal law addressing crimes against future generations. These speakers are of course just a small selection. The current Ombudsman for Future Generations of the Hungarian Parliament, Sandor Fülop, and the former Ombudsman from the Israeli Knesset, Schlomo Shoham, gave valuable insights into the work of institutions established to protect the interests of future generations. A full participant list of the conference can be found on the website.

The results of the conference will be documented in the scope of the Intergenerational Justice Review of the Foundation for the Rights of Future Generations. The journal is accessible freely and will be published by the beginning of July on the homepage of the foundation.

Thanks for reading!

Comment on the General Elections in the UK

These days I think back a lot to my stay in Leicester, a middle-sized town in the English East-Midlands, right around the corner of Nottingham and Robin Hood's famous Sherwood Forest. I stayed there in 2005/2006 for an Erasmus term. The elections for the German Bundestag took place just a couple of days before I caught my coach to England.

I vividly remember how many other Erasmus students and especially my English co-students in the different seminars asked us Germans what was going on in Germany and how it could be possible that the politicians were not able to form a government for weeks.
The social democrat chancellor of Germany, Gerhard Schröder, had triggered a snap election after losing a couple of important regions to the conservatives. Surprisingly the conservatives did not manage to achieve a clear victory despite the low popularity of the SPD government.

Chancellor Schroeder's appearance on election day has become famous for his psyched behaviour bordering on straight arrogance and many people were wondering if he was actually intoxicated. Long story short: Schroeder refused to step down to make a grand coalition under a chancellor Merkel possible and a political deadlock froze the Federal Republic for many weeks until Schroeder finally gave up and a CDU/SPD coalition could start its work.

In Leicester, we were talking a lot about the advantages and disadvantages of the British style first-past-the-post system and the German system of proportional representation at that time. Most people (including myself) considered it an advantage of the first-past-the-post system, that there was a very low danger of a hung parliament or a blockade like in Germany in 2005.

The General Elections in the UK on May 6th have now proven that this is not necessarily true. The majority of the British citizens are tired of Labour (at least according to 90% of all newspaper articles that I have read on the topic). But their voters are a more coherent group and have a higher regional concentration than those of the Tories or the LibDems, which means that with first-past-the-post even a hugely unpopular government has a chance to cling to power. Even though Labour is the main loser of the general elections, it is not clear yet if Tories and LibDems will be able to get to a coalition agreement, especially since David Cameron apparently does not even want to talk about the LibDems' main demand of reforming the electoral system of the UK.

Regardless of the outcome, the UK case illustrates a worrisome tendency: Not even a first-past-the-post system can apparently stop the decay of the large catch-all parties in Europe. In France, the political left is in hopeless disarray, much the same can be said for Italy. The big German parties are increasingly dependent on three-party coalitions in order to form a government in the German Länder, a trend that seems to be reinforced by the results of the elections in North Rhine-Westfalia today. Of course the LibDems benefited from the youthful charisma of their leader Nick Clegg and the frustration after the long Labour years. The only safe thing to say is that the negotiations about who will take power for the next couple of years in the UK will be interesting to watch. If the Tories fail to win the LibDems over, we could even witness Gordon Brown's comeback. The effects of this historical result on the first-past-the-post system is the second big question mark that will be answered within the next few days.