Oct 30, 2023
By Eurasia Review
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“The Human Right to the Environment affirms the right to life itself. When humans protect nature, they are also securing human health and wellbeing.” An article by eminent environmental lawyer Prof. Nicholas A. Robinson sees the recognition of the Human Right to the Environment (HRE) as a first step in a long process of restoring a healthy environment for people and the planet.
Professor Robinson’s article is published in a special issue of the Journal of Environmental Policy and Law on The Human Right to Sustainable Environment. In the preface Editor-in-Chief Bharat H. Desai, PhD, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Centre for International Legal Studies, stresses the essentiality of the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, the importance of which is increasingly evident in the wake of the Political Declaration adopted at the SDG Summit (New York: September 18-19, 2023). This called to “act with urgency to realize its vision as a plan of action for people, planet, prosperity, peace, and partnership, leaving no one behind. We will endeavour to reach the furthest behind first.”
“The progressive attainment of Sustainable Development Goals will require investments of time and effort beyond the target date of 2030, but momentum has begun and can be sustained,” according to Prof. Robinson, JD, Executive Governor, International Council of Environmental Law, Kerlin Professor of Environmental Law Emeritus, at the Elisabeth Haub School of Law of Pace University.
Prof. Robinson continues: “These past 50 years, virtually all states have neglected to enforce their environmental statutes. Scientific studies confirm that harm to public health and natural systems has escalated during this time. The right to the environment will breathe rigor into the governmental enforcement of environmental protection norms. This will not be easy, as business as usual and inertia retard change. It is past time for making peace with nature.”
When the United Nations General Assembly adopted its landmark Resolution A/76/300 on July 28, 2022, entitled “The human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment,” a new human rights framework was launched. The UN Environment Program described environmental crises of climate change, biological diversity loss, and escalating pollution of the planet as the triple threat to human civilization, calling upon all states to “make peace with nature.”
The human right “to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment” is already being implemented. The UN General Assembly recognized that this right is related to other rights and international law, and that the vast majority of states have already incorporated the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment into their national laws. However, in most countries this basic right is not yet being enforced in courts. The UN General Assembly urged international organizations, commercial enterprises, and all relevant stakeholders to share best practices and further build capacity “to share good practices in order to scale up efforts to ensure a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment for all.”
The article in Environmental Policy and Law highlights one such example of international collaboration: the Global Judicial Institute on the Environment (GJIE), which is an independent association of judges launched in 2016 with the assistance of the World Commission on Environmental Law of the International Union for the Conservation of Nature and the UN Environment Programme. Not all countries have judicial institutions to provide continuing judicial education of judges and court personnel. There is no inter-governmental international service to assist courts. GJIE is a network by judges for judges, filling this gap in international cooperation.
The addition of the “Green Amendment” to the New York Bill of Rights and its implications are also highlighted in the article. New York’s Constitutional Bill of Rights now guarantees the liberty that “each person shall have a right to clean air and water and a healthful environment.” In the first year under the new Bill of Rights provision, there are now four lawsuits pending in New York courts.
Prof. Robinson elaborates: “Campaigning to secure adoption of the ‘Green Amendment’ in New York took more than 15 years. Inertia is a powerful force, and governmental frameworks tend to perpetuate past arrangements. Business as usual is not the status quo, it is regression. Failure across any and all sectors to adapt and embrace the Human Right to the Environment places the life, liberty, and property of each person in jeopardy. Slow reforms themselves are insufficient, in light of the destruction of wildfires, floods, droughts, and heat waves on land and under ocean waters. ‘Scaling up’ requires systemic and profound change. Notwithstanding all their problems, courts are the one authority that can oblige the public and private sectors alike to respect the right to life.”
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Oct 27, 2023
Domicide: the destruction of homes in Gaza reminds me of what happened to my city, Homs
Ammar Azzouz, University of Oxford
The above-featured image is one of the author’s selections and is “Flames and smoke rise from the site of twin bombings at al-Khodhary Street in Karm al-Loz neighborhood, Homs, Syria, April 2014. EPA/stringer”
This article accompanies an episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast featuring an interview with the author, Ammar Azzouz.
The Israeli bombardment of Gaza following the Hamas attack on southern Israel on October 7 has forced hundreds of thousands of Palestinians out of their homes. At least 43% of all housing units in the Gaza Strip have been either destroyed or damaged since the start of the hostilities, according to the Ministry of Public Works and Housing in Gaza.
Israel says that 1,400 people were killed in the Hamas attack on Israel and more than 220 taken hostage. Meanwhile, according to the health authorities in Hamas-run Gaza, more than 6,500 people have been killed in Israeli air strikes and more than 17,400 injured.
There is a modern term for what’s happening in Gaza. Domicide refers to the deliberate destruction of home, or the killing of the city or home. It comes from the Latin word domus which means home and cide, which is deliberate killing.
But, home here doesn’t only mean the physical, tangible built environment of people’s homes and properties, it also refers to people’s sense of belonging and identity. We are seeing in many conflicts and wars across the world that alongside the destruction of architecture, people’s sense of dignity and belonging is also being targeted.
There is a link between genocide and domicide: genocide refers to the killing of people and domicide to the erasure of their presence and their material culture. In 2022, a UN expert on housing argued that domicide should be recognised as an international crime.
When people are continuously displaced from their homes, sometimes for decades, or even a lifetime, there’s a sense of grief and sorrow that their history is being erased.
The destruction of Homs
My home city of Homs, Syria, which I focus on in my research, has been completely transformed since the 2011 uprising against the government of Bashar al Assad.
Over 50% of the neighbourhoods have been heavily destroyed, and over a quarter partially destroyed. Across the country, more than 12 million Syrians have been displaced from their homes. Of these, 6.8 million people are displaced inside the country, and 5.4 million people live as refugees in neighbouring countries and beyond.
Domicidal campaigns like this also work to erase evidence that a community actually existed in a particular place and that it had a history and culture there. This is an attempt to write people out of history through destroying their homes and heritage in a way that’s systematic and deliberate. In Homs, for example, whole neighbourhoods that opposed the Assad regime were targeted and razed to the ground. In other cities, such as Damascus and Hama, entire neighbourhoods were wiped out through new land and property laws which designate these neighbourhoods as “informal”.
Listen to Ammar Azzouz talk about his research on The Conversation Weekly podcast.
Domicide in Gaza
There is no need to compare Homs and Gaza, as each place has its own context and struggle. But I’ve been following the news continuously since the Hamas attack on Israel, and I can’t stop looking at the updates about the heavy Israeli bombing. The scale of destruction, the level of mass displacement is just so heartbreaking. Gaza has been described as an open prison and people in that open prison have been pushed away from their homes.
Israel says it has the right to defend itself, and is targeting Hamas positions, but the scale to which ordinary people’s homes, hospitals and “safe areas” have been hit means what’s happening in Gaza is absolutely domicidal. People living in the north of the Gaza Strip were told by Israeli authorities to move to the south of the territory to the supposed “safe areas”, but the southern areas continue to be bombed too. The bombardment is killing civilians, killing their everyday lives and causing the mass destruction of neighbourhoods. As we have seen in videos, entire buildings have been levelled.
Israeli-British historian Avi Shlaim, an emeritus fellow at the University of Oxford, who was born in Baghdad, and is considered one of Israel’s critical “new historians”, called Israel’s actions “state-sponsored terrorism”. Raz Segal, an Israeli historian, wrote: “Israel’s genocidal assault on Gaza is quite explicit, open, and unashamed.” Others argue vehemently against any moral equivalence with the Hamas attacks.
Catastrophe for Palestinians
It’s not the first time that Palestinians in Gaza have had their homes destroyed. Many of the Palestinians who live in Gaza are people who have been displaced before. This is why many academics, activists, journalists and even Queen Rania Al Abdullah of Jordan, call for context, for situating the Palestinian struggle within a history of suffering, dispossession and forced displacement since the Nakba (catastrophe) in 1948.
When one million people are ordered to leave their homes it’s important to understand that these people have attachment to their places, to their neighbourhoods, to their streets. The impact of displacement and loss of home can live with people for their lifetime.
In my interviews with people from the city of Homs, I’ve heard many people say that even if they are still living in Homs, they feel like strangers in their own city, or they feel exiled inside their own city. For people such as the Palestinian diaspora or the Iraqi diaspora or the Syrian diaspora who are unable to return to their home countries, that suffering and pain and trauma of displacement continues.
I imagine people have different mechanisms to cope with these traumatic events, but that’s why it’s so important to have memory projects where people at least can reflect on what happened to heal and grieve, even when, sadly, many are unable to return and some spend their lifetime in exile.
After researching conflicts, wars, dictatorships and occupations for several years, I always say that the pain of people start as a headline in the news media, and turns into a footnote in history. Let us resist that, let us remember the life of every human being and keep the struggle for a free and just world for everyone.
Ammar Azzouz, British Academy Research Fellow, School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
Oct 26, 2023
A Peer-Reviewed Publication about our life in the future that cannot be envisaged without a decent and effective system of learning for future generations.
The above-featured image is for illustration and is credit to Pinterest.
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A sustainable future is based on a learning society
UNIVERSITY OF EASTERN FINLAND
Escalating planetary crises, including climate change, the depletion of natural resources and the human-induced sixth mass extinction, pose increasing demands on pursuing a good life. As the planet is reaching its limits, old perceptions of well-being are being questioned.
A holistic transformation is needed for the planet to accommodate people’s pursuit of well-being. A new study by an international team of researchers explores a Theory of Planetary Social Pedagogy as a driver of a transformative process based on a learning society.
The Theory of Planetary Social Pedagogy is a way of learning applicable to all societal sectors. According to it, people, societies and the world are an interlinked, systemic entity. Such a worldview can make life meaningful, increase people’s experiences of belonging and inclusion, expand the scope of care, and help people identify their opportunities to influence.
In a time marked by crises, learning to be one with the world is increasingly essential. In many ways, our everyday lives are linked with all other life on Earth. People are constantly connected to their surrounding reality through, for example, the food they eat and the air they breathe.
According to Professor Arto O. Salonen of the University of Eastern Finland, the study’s lead author, the main reason behind the escalating planetary crises is the illusion of people being detached from their surrounding reality.
“As we strive for a comprehensive sustainability transition, we need increasingly robust and more systemic interpretations of reality.”
The current political strategy for a sustainable future emphasises economic and technological progress, but that is not enough. Learning is needed, too. A learning society relies on changes in its citizens’ values, beliefs and worldviews.
“How we become aware of our everyday connection to other people and nature at the level of our emotions, body and mind stands at the core of the sustainability transition,” says Planning Manager Erkka Laininen of the OKKA Foundation for Teaching, Education, and Personal Development, a co-author of the study. Having an experience of belonging to and being part of the world strengthens people’s sense of meaningfulness and their agency needed in building a sustainable future.
The transformative power of a learning society can be a key factor in the green transformation permeating all society, in which citizens’ consumer behaviour and ways of living, moving and producing food and energy are organised in new ways. Conceptions of work and the economy can be reformed, too.
A sustainable future is not about life becoming more miserable – it’s about life becoming richer and more meaningful as hope for the future grows stronger.
JOURNAL
Educational Theory
Oct 25, 2023
What young Palestinians think about four key issues that affect their lives when Palestinian Rights Advocates Refuse to Applaud.
Anas-Mohammed/Shutterstock
Israel-Hamas conflict: what young Palestinians think about four key issues that affect their lives
By Erika Jiménez, Queen’s University Belfast
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On the eighth day of the current intensification of hostilities between Israel and Hamas, I saw a tweet that said that there would be more uproar in the west if “2.2 million golden retrievers [were] being bombed to extinction in an inescapable cage” instead of Palestinian civilians in Gaza.
This tweet took me back to interviews I conducted with 96 young Palestinians and their teachers in the West Bank in the aftermath of the 2014 invasion of Gaza and published in a journal recently. We talked about issues that affected their daily lives, not least their awareness of human rights as well as how the rest of the world perceives the Palestinians’ struggle.
I wanted to find out about the different ways Palestinian youth in grades nine and ten (aged 13-15) across a range of public, private and United Nations schools understood, talked about and used human rights – especially when the ideals they learned about at school contrasted with their struggles for rights in their daily life. In my conversations with these young people, they opened up to me about a range of issues that they confront in their daily life.
1. Dehumanisation of Palestinians
The young people I spoke with, who were from a range of different socioeconomic and religious backgrounds, often described how they felt dehumanised in discourse on Israel-Palestine relations. This failure to see them as fellow humans with the same wants, needs and – importantly – human rights as every one else, they felt, has come to be accepted globally.
But they also often used similar language to describe how they live under occupation. Hiba, a girl in grade nine studying at a private school joked that: “It’s funny how animals have more rights than the humans in Palestine”. Then, more seriously, she added: “We’re not equal, we are different from other children in the world.”
The idea that the value of a Palestinian life is ranked lower than the lives of others was another talking point. Anwar, a grade nine female refugee student at a school run by the UN said that: “In western countries if someone dies they make a massive issue of it. But if we Palestinians were killed whether it was 100 to 1,000, then it’s normal and OK. Palestinians are numbers.”
The rhetoric displayed by Israeli officials over the past fortnight shows this dehumanisation at work. Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant in announcing the complete siege of Gaza asserted that: “We are fighting human animals.” His words were echoed by Israeli Major General Ghassan Alian who said to Palestinians in Gaza that “human animals must be treated as such”.
Scholars have shown in the past how this sort of dehumanising rhetoric often precedes acts of genocide.
2. Their parents’ and leaders’ generation
Many of the young people I spoke to were critical of how their elders – especially the leadership of the Palestinian Authority (PA) – appeared to have come to accept the occupation. Talking about the 2014 war in Gaza, Camilla, who was studying at a private school, told me: “Our government acts like they don’t care whether we are occupied or not … Israelis are killing kids and the government is not letting [sic] Israel pay for it.”
This week, Palestinians across the West Bank have joined protests against Israel’s bombardment of Gaza. But they have also been highly critical of the PA. In response PA security forces have cracked down on and fired live ammunition at demonstrators, killing young people like Razan Nasrallah, a 12-year-old girl from Jenin who was shot and killed in the West Bank city on October 17 while protesting at the attack on a Gaza hospital which killed hundreds of Palestinians.
Although some young people were also cynical about the prospect of seeing an end to the occupation in their lifetime, most were optimistic. Anwar, a grade nine pupil at a UN school told me that while “adults feel that it is over … as young people, we still have hope because we have a future”.
3. Israelis: even occupiers deserve human rights
Many of the young people I interviewed in 2015 were keen to make a distinction between most Jewish people living in Israel and those whose vision of a Zionist Jewish homeland involves the displacement of native Palestinians. As Jiries, a grade nine pupil at a private school told me:
Some people say that Jews are the one who are Zionist … but they’re wrong because there are a lot of Jews that support us … I just want to make sure that everyone who reads about “Jews” or “Zionists” can separate between the two.
The students were also keen to stress that not all of the Jewish community supports the state of Israel’s policy towards Palestine – and during the current conflict there are many Jewish groups around the world standing in solidarity with them:
The young people I interviewed lived in areas of the West Bank controlled by the Palestinian Authority (PA), which are officially off limits for Israelis. So, most of the young people’s encounters with Israelis would have been with settlers or soldiers either at checkpoints or during military raids. Young people held different views on their perceptions of the Israelis they’d encountered. Lina, a girl in grade nine at a UN school for refugee children stressed the difference between soldiers and citizens, meanwhile her classmate Nadiya, said:
In the Gaza war they didn’t differentiate between civilians and soldiers, Israelis target civilians and most of those who were killed were children, women and old people.
But when I asked this group of refugee girls if they thought an Israeli young person their age should enjoy the same human rights as them, they unanimously agreed.
4. Hope for the future
The occupied Palestinian territories have a young population: the median age in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is 19.6 years and in Gaza more than 40% of people are 14 or younger. Since October 7 2023, a Palestinian child has been killed about every 15 minutes.
For those who survive, military attacks can leave children with life-changing disabilities, without parental care, and can have long-term adverse impacts on their mental health. Other children may yet die because they can’t access food, water, or life-saving medical treatment because of the siege.
Despite being disproportionately affected by the violence, the views of young people are rarely consulted and their voices are largely missing in commentaries and decision-making processes that will affect their lives. Young people in society do not necessarily reproduce the views of adults around them. And often adults don’t listen when the young speak.
As Marwan, one of the young people I spoke to put it: “[adults] don’t understand that we are mature enough to understand our world”. Young people in Gaza and those in exile have addressed the international community calling for an immediate ceasefire.
The question is, who will listen and act upon these young people’s calls? They are the future of Palestine and their voices must be heard.
Erika Jiménez, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at the School of Law, Queen’s University Belfast
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
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