Kids Sue For Climate Change

I read an article in the New York Times just today regarding an interesting topic. The story was written August 28, 2023 by Somini Sengupta and entitled. 'Children Have a Right to Sue Nations Over Climate, U.N. Panel Says'. It is in regards to the treaty on the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Every country on the planet has signed it but not the US.

Children have a right to a clean and healthy environment which is what this considers. I agree. In fact, this is not a legal law but works in favour of those who want other countries to consider global warming and to take omissions seriously. So I am behind anyone who helps a child to do this. Here is what the article says: "Young people around the world are increasingly taking their governments to court for failing to reduce climate pollution, and on rare occasions, they are winning.

This week, their efforts received an endorsement from an independent panel of experts that interprets United Nations human rights law, the Committee on the Rights of the Child. In an expansive 20-page document released Monday, the committee said all countries have a legal obligation to protect children from environmental degradation — including by “regulating business enterprises” — and to allow their underage citizens to seek legal recourse.

The committee’s opinion is not legally binding and is therefore impossible to enforce. But it is significant because it is based on a widely recognized international treaty and explicitly recognizes children’s right to go to court to force their government to slow down the climate crisis.

That treaty is the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which is considered the most widely ratified treaty in history because every country in the world except the United States has signed on to it. In the past, courts in many countries, including on rare occasions the United States, have relied on the committee’s interpretations in their decisions.

“Children have the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment,” the committee wrote. “This right is implicit in the convention and directly linked to, in particular, the rights to life, survival and development.”

As they say, food for thought and worth repeating.