The World Future Counsil - For Sustainability, Justice, Ending Poverty & Working for Peace

Hans Lak posted an announcement to the cause Join and support the World Future Council;

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The World Future Council, a group of 50 activists, politicians and thinkers from around the world, is focused on finding ways to prevent today’s actions from constraining tomorrow’s choices. The group just wrapped up a two-day symposium in Montreal at which more than 100 experts in international law explored ways to use legal tools, most of which are oriented toward doling out justice among those alive now, to avert what amount to crimes against the future.

These include such actions as driving species to extinction and adding long-lived greenhouse gases to the atmosphere in ways that have few impacts now, but could disrupt climate patterns, ocean ecosystems and coastal settlements in decades to come. In a news release, the council said that world leaders, through decades of statements on sustainable development, have pledged to balance current needs with the obligation to avoid impoverishing the future. “But the legal enforcement of these agreements is still very limited,” it noted.

In a news release, C.G. Weeramantry, a member of the council and former vice president of the International Court of Justice, described the group’s goal this way:

We are today using international law in a heartless fashion, for we think only of those who are alive here and now and shut our eyes to the rest of the vast family of humanity who are yet to come. This forecloses to future generations their rights to the basic fundamentals of civilized existence: acknowledging them as holders of rights in the eyes of our law.”

This harks back to a post here about a proposal for the creation of a government position of “ legal guardian of future generations.”

What do you think? Are we mature enough as a species to safeguard the rights of future generations without the threat of a day in court?


Namasté
Hans Lak
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