CiR2P Option 12 | Promote respect for the law
DISCUSSION:
Promoting respect for the rule of law can help ameliorate the systematic manipulation, disregard, and or abuse of the law by government officials and the population at large. Options that can help change the legal landscape in a target country can include directing funds towards, first, adequate resourcing of courts staffed with effective, honest and independent judges and legal professionals; second, supporting access to affordable legal remedies for the population; and third, developing clear and reasonable legal rules not least those governing commercial transactions.
Laws relating to environmental protection are well established world-over, whether they be on illegal logging or poaching and trafficking in any number of endangered species.
Climate-related national and subnational laws such as those prescribing low carbon transitions in electricity, transport, and land-use sectors, and adaptation, are rapidly proliferating across developed and developing countries, including in those subjected to mass atrocities.
Similarly, climate-related litigation against governments and their agencies that are deemed to be providing inadequate climate laws and protections is also proliferating.
However, none of the countries that have been subjected to a mass atrocity event in this century have had an instance where climate-related litigation has been brought to bear against government or corporate entities.
By contract, the US has had more than 1500 climate ligation cases.
The Biden Administration has identified ‘environmental and climate justice as a core tenet’ of its climate plan because poorer communities and populations in the US have ‘faced disproportionate harm from climate change and environmental contaminants for decades’.
To redress this disproportionate harm, the Biden Administration has established an Environmental and Climate Justice Division within the U.S. Department of Justice. The new Division extends government powers to protect populations vulnerable to environmental and climate-related harm.
The Biden Administration could seek to extend this thinking to its development assistance program, both to assist with the development of top-down climate laws as well as to ensure that vulnerable populations in fragile countries have access to basic legal remedies in the pursuit of rectifying environmental injustices in their communities.
Western countries could also open-up opportunities in universities located in donor and recipient countries to train legal professional on emerging regulations and contractual transactions relevant to the low-pollution transition.