Source: dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com
MONTREAL, CANADA, June 1, 2009:The World Future Council has just completed a two-day symposium in Montreal in which over 100 experts in international law explored ways to use legal tools to prevent crimes against the future–such crimes as driving species to extinction and continuing to add long-lived greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, which could disrupt climate patterns and ocean ecosystems and inundate low-lying coastal areas inhabited by millions.
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.
C.G. Weeramantry, a council member and former vice president of the International Court of Justice, stated, “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.”