ECO is delighted to have secured a precious badge for SB60, and is ready to bring you the unadorned straight talk that you won’t get from Parties.
From this position of privilege, ECO takes the opportunity to remind its dear readers that there is still no climate justice without human rights. Climate impacts are worsening by the day. Since we last met in Dubai, floods in Kenya and Brazil, record-breaking heat waves in India and other parts of South Asia, as well as an early wildfire season in North America have all affected a wide range of human rights – the rights to health, livelihoods and decent work, adequate housing and, most devastatingly, the right to life itself.
While the urgency of equitable and fair solutions to the climate crisis can no longer be ignored, countries keep fuelling the climate crisis by burning fossil fuels and engaging in activities leading to deforestation and forest or land degradation, and critical public finance remains all too scarce. ECO wonders why… Could it be because polluting industries are still in the room, but civil society – and that means people everywhere – have less and less space for speaking up, protesting and joining others to demand climate justice?
Rather than listening to the critical voices of the people and communities on the frontlines calling for justice, too many countries are locking up people who speak their minds or preventing them from going out in the streets to protest – including outside this very conference center and the one we’ll be meeting in at COP29. People speaking up against unfolding genocide are demonized and silenced in far too many countries. They even faced barriers to raise their voices in the Blue Zone at COP28.
The prospects at COP29 are also grim: yet again, negotiations will be held in a country known for severe restrictions on freedom of expression (what you can say freely), of association (that is, organizing together), and of peaceful protest (e.g. marching or chanting in public). Lucky for ECO, last year’s Arrangements for Intergovernmental Meetings (AIM) conclusions demanded human rights guarantees in host country agreements, and committed to making those public. So ECO must be able to verify these guarantees are in place. But after an unfruitful months-long quest to find the COP28 host country agreement, ECO can do nothing but conclude that the word ‘public’ must be one of those complicated UNFCCC acronyms (P.U.B.L.I.C. = Particularly Unfindable, Blocked, Limited, Inaccessible and Closed-Off).
ECO stands in solidarity with our imprisoned, harassed, and threatened sisters and brothers who are trying to create a better world and have suffered as a result. ECO stands with all those deprived of liberty or facing repression around the world. We are watching, demanding an immediate end to these practices, and reminding negotiators that human rights aren’t just a slogan: they are real and tangible legal obligations. And it is every State’s responsibility to ensure that they are respected and fulfilled, from the outcomes of the climate negotiations to the streets surrounding them.