International Herald Tribune
One hundred and thirty chief justices and senior judges urged environmentalists Tuesday to take miscreant corporations and backsliding governments to court to protect the Earth's resources.
They called for bolstering the capacity of legal systems to make it easier for the public, particularly the poor who are often the hardest-hit victims of environmental crimes, to gain access to the courts.
There was even a suggestion for the eventual creation of an international environment court, according to Pius Langa, deputy chief justice of South Africa. "The discussion is just starting," he said.
While delegates from 190 countries, the most ever to attend a UN meeting, continued to haggle over language at the World Summit on Sustainable Development here, the judges argued that there were already enough environmental laws and what was lacking was the will to implement them.
The question of public access to information, including legal information, is becoming a contentious issue at the conference. Many nongovernmental organizations and civic groups who are meeting in a Global Forum several kilometers away from the main conference site are asserting that the event has been hijacked by corporate interests and that the peoples' voice is not being heard.
In contrast to the remote Global Forum, an exhibition by the luxury carmaker BMW dominates a square just outside the main conference center of the summit meeting. Industry bosses lobby the summiteers from their headquarters in a nearby luxury hotel.
Sue Markham, a spokeswoman for the UN, said the organization welcomed participation from as many representatives of civil society as possible and that the only reason to exclude people was the 6,000- seat capacity of the conference center.
Nevertheless, frustration was building and the police were preparing for possibly violent protests by the militant Landless Peoples Movement when at least 104 heads of state and government arrive for the main part of the summit meeting this weekend.
Protests would be aimed at sending "a clear and unambiguous message to our leaders that ordinary people can no longer tolerate the current environmentally destructive practices," said Gordon Bispham one of the organizers of the Global Forum. "We can no longer tolerate the continued neglect of the poor by our political leaders. We are tired of broken promises."
The issue of access to information is analyzed in a new study by the World Resources Institute, a Washington environmental group, which found that in nine countries it studied, information about the environment was often kept secret or made public too late for people to influence large projects. As a result, communities often learn about new mining, drilling or tree-stripping operations when the bulldozers arrived.
Elena Petkova, lead author of the study, said that when citizens participated in decisions, the final outcome was invariably better. She said the findings held true for countries of very different levels of income and development.
Despite the U.S. refusal to participate in the International Criminal Court, a senior American judge, Clifford Wallace of the U.S. Court of Appeals, attended the meeting of senior judges here. The United States also helped finance the panel, which was organized by the United Nations Environment Program.
