Posted on 03/28/2008 3:50:39 PM PDT by Tailgunner Joe
Climate change is now officially a human rights issue, as the UN Human Rights Council on Friday passed a resolution on the subject, recognising that the world's poor are particularly vulnerable.
The council also gave the green light for a study into the impact of climate change on human rights, describing climate change as a "global problem .. that requires a global solution".
The resolution, submitted by the Maldives and passed without a vote, also noted that the poor tend to have limited resources to cope with the impact of global warming.
The country's Foreign Minister Abdulla Shahid told AFP that climate change "violates all human rights" -- from the basic to the fundamental.
"In the case of Maldives, the right to life itself," he said.
The island state is among the world's most vulnerable states to global warming, as it risks being submerged by rising sea waters.
Shahid said Maldives appreciated various forums which have already been discussing the climate change issue.
"But the very important aspect of the human dimension is sometimes lost. Scientific and economic issues have all been taken into account," he said, adding that the country wanted to use the resolution to highlight the human dimension of the problem.
When introducing the resolution in Geneva, Maldives' representative told delegates that the debate on the subject had so far tended to focus on physical effects, while the "phenomenon on human beings" had been largely overlooked.
"It is time to highlight the human face of climate change," he said.
Supporting the resolution, Sri Lanka's representative called it "timely" and said because of climate change, even "the right to life is under threat".
The council's resolution acknowledged findings by the landmark report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which said the evidence of a human role in the warming of the planet was now "unequivocal", and that the situation could be irreversible.
It also cited those most vulnerable to the effects of climate change: low-lying and small island states; countries with low-lying coastal, arid and semi-arid areas or areas prone to floods, drought, and desertification; and developing countries with fragile mountainous ecosystems.
Greenpeace political adviser Daniel Mittler welcomed the resolution, saying that it "points to the right direction".
"We have always maintained that climate change is way more than an environment issue, it is a security issue, an economic issue - in fact it is the most important economic issue of our time, and indeed a human rights issue.
"It has a direct impact on people's lives, the ability of people to lead decent livelihoods. For example, Africans who can't farm as they used to or Alaskans who can no longer maintain their traditional lifestyle due to climate change effects."
However, he pointed out that the study proposed by the council is to be conducted "within existing resources", and said that more should be done to ensure that a thorough study be done.
"It's so ironical, if climate change is such a key issue, then countries should put more resources behind it," said Mittler.
In its first consideration of the issue, the 47-member forum endorsed a resolution stressing that global warming threatens the livelihoods and welfare of many of the world's most vulnerable people.
The proposal from the Maldives, Comoros, Tuvalu, Micronesia and other countries called for "a detailed analytical study of the relationship between climate change and human rights", to be conducted by the Office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights, headed by Louise Arbour.
"Until now, the global discourse on climate change has tended to focus on the physical or natural impacts of climate change," the Maldives' ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, Abdul Ghafoor Mohamed, told the session.
"The immediate and far-reaching impact of the phenomenon on human beings around the world has been largely neglected," he said. "It is time to redress this imbalance by highlighting the human face of climate change."
U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon has made the fight against climate change one of his top priorities, and encouraged all U.N. agencies to incorporate it into their work.
away with the un.
Americans really need to do something about this sewer being located in the U.S. It’s definitely time for the U.N. circus to “move on.” They’ve overstayed their welcome.
new world math:
global problems + global solutions = US tax dollars
Indeed. Well said. The fleecing of the American taxpayer and bringing the USofA to its knees is part of the global warming agenda.
Summary: The UN is coming up with more excuses to make itself the supreme government in the world.
I agree....we need to pull out of the UN, but evidently, just because this is our country, we don’t have the right any longer to demand this. The UN is crooked, 300 million of our people know this. Our government knows this. So who is keeping us in the UN? Who is pulling the strings?
This is like the right to “unity of opinion” promoted at some international conference or the other a decade or two ago.
Maybe we can leverage this. Isn’t there a human right to exchange views on a right wing political web site? Isn’t there also a human right to invest privately in debt and equity instruments. Who can forget the human right to protect one’s person and property using commonly available tools and techniques?
I gotta add that socialism is a global problem that needs local solutions.
No. There is not. The views expressed might offend, harass, insult or otherwise make a “protected group” feel insecure. According to the UN, this violates their human rights, even if the statements are true.
Why don’t these lousy SOBs endorse a resolution that corrupt and evil tyrants like Robert Mugabe, Ayatollah Khamenei and his little puppet Ahmadinejad, Hugo Chavez, Hu Jintao, and Kim Jong-il are what really threatens the livelihoods and welfare of many of the world’s most vulnerable people?
“Climate change now a UN human rights issue”
It sure is. THE GLOBAL WARMING MOVEMENT IS, IN BLUNT TERMS, AN EVIL, ANTI-HUMAN CULT. ITS AIMS ARE TO IMPOVERISH DEVELOPED NATIONS AND KEEP POOR NATIONS FROM IMPROVING THEIR CONDITION.
C.S. Lewis, in his excellent science fiction novel “That Hideous Strength,” tells of a rather mad scientist who dreams of making the Earth look like the surface of the moon - so “clean”, completely barren of organic life. The basis of organic life, as any Star Trek viewer knows, is carbon. The “mad scientist” essentially wanted to eliminate carbon. And now we see the scientific elites declaring war on nothing less than carbon - the basis of all life on earth. - [xjcsa] LU Class of 1997 (Liberty University) as posted on The Free Republic on March 29, 2008
Sure is a human rights issue. Yup.
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