GENEVA, August 28, 2023 — CIEL welcomed today’s new authoritative United Nations guidance which recognizes the grave impacts of environmental crises on children’s rights and provides guidance on what governments must do to prevent, mitigate, and remediate such harms as a matter of their legally binding obligations.
The UN Committee on the Rights of the Child General Comment on Children’s Rights and the Environment with a Special Focus on Climate Change (General Comment No. 26) builds global standards for governments to ensure that children can live in a clean, healthy and sustainable world.
It will now be critical for governments to ensure that their policies are compatible with their international legally binding obligations, including as further articulated in this guidance. The guidance also has the potential to influence the rising tide of climate and environmental litigation cases around the world and could become a pivotal tool to hold governments accountable for insufficient and inadequate climate and environmental action.
CIEL Senior Attorney Sébastien Duyck released the following statement:
“As the Convention on the Rights of the Child is the most widely ratified human rights treaty, this authoritative guidance should compel governments to review relevant policies to ensure that these adequately contribute to meeting their legal obligation to protect children’s rights. The guidance also provides a compass to guide international courts currently working to clarify the legal responsibilities of States.
This updated understanding of States’ legal obligations also has the potential to hold policymakers accountable in international negotiations, not only for failing to act on the interconnected environmental crises, but also for contributing to climate and pollution-induced harms by supporting fossil fuel production and use. The Committee makes clear that governments cannot ignore environmental destruction and cannot shirk their duty to protect the right to a healthy environment.
The triple planetary crisis of pollution, climate change and biodiversity loss threatens the rights of present and future generations of children in an unprecedented manner. This guidance is a very timely legal instrument to support children and youth as they demand action to address climate change and other environmental crises.”
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