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	Washington Court rules Young have the Right to Stable Climate by Our Childrens Trust, news agencies USA   First published: 20 Nov. 2015   Washington Court rules Young have the Right to Stable Climate.   A group of young petitioners in Washington state fighting for a stable climate were vindicated this week when a judge affirmed that the state has a constitutional and public trust obligation to protect the environment.   "It’s incredible to have the court finally say that we do have a right to a healthy atmosphere and that our government can’t allow it to be harmed," said 13-year-old petitioner Gabriel Mandell.   Gabriel joined seven other young people in the case supported by Our Children''s Trust that had requested the state''s Department of Ecology use the best available science to write a rule on reductions in carbon dioxide emissions.   King County Superior Court Judge Hollis R. Hill wrote in her ruling that the youths "very survival depends upon the will of their elders to act now, decisively and unequivocally, to stem the tide of global warming by accelerating the reduction of emission of GHGs before doing so becomes too costly and too late."   "The scientific evidence is clear that the current rates of reduction mandated by Washington law cannot achieve the GHG reductions necessary to protect our environment and to ensure the survival of an environment in which Petitioners can grow to adulthood safely," Hollis wrote, adding that "the State has a constitutional obligation to protect the public''s interest in natural resources held in trust for the common benefit of the people of the State."   She added: "the Public Trust Mandate requires that the State act through its designated agency to protect what it holds in trust. The Department of Ecology is the agency authorized both to recommend changes to statutory emissions standards and to establish limits that are responsible."   Western Environmental Law Center Attorney Andrea Rodgers explains, Hollis "has made it very clear what Ecology must do when promulgating the Clean Air Rule: preserve, protect and enhance air quality for present and future generations and uphold the constitutional rights of these young people."   "This ruling means that what the Department of Ecology does going forward in its rule-making has to protect us, the kids of Washington, and not just us, but future generations too, those to come. Now they can’t decide to protect short-term economic fears and ignore us because we have constitutional and public trust rights to a stable climate", said 13-year-old petitioner Gabriel Mandell.   12 Aug. 2015   Today, on International Youth Day, 21 young people from across the United States filed a landmark constitutional climate change lawsuit against the federal government in the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon. Also acting as a Plaintiff is world-renown climate scientist Dr. James E. Hansen, serving as guardian for future generations and for his granddaughter, and Earth Guardians, representing young citizen beneficiaries of the public trust.   The Complaint asserts that, in causing climate change, the federal government has violated the youngest generation’s constitutional rights to life, liberty, property, and has failed to protect essential public trust resources.   The Complaint alleges the Federal Government is violating the youth’s constitutional rights by promoting the development and use of fossil fuels. These young Plaintiffs are challenging the federal government’s national fossil fuel programs. Plaintiffs seek to hold the President and various federal agencies responsible for continued fossil fuel exploitation.   The Federal Government has known for decades that fossil fuels are destroying the climate system. No less important than in the Civil Rights cases, Plaintiffs seek a court order requiring the President to immediately implement a national plan to decrease atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (“CO2”) to a safe level: 350 ppm by the year 2100.   http://ourchildrenstrust.org/event/717/breaking-judge-protects-right-stable-climate-groundbreaking-decision-washington-case http://ourchildrenstrust.org/science http://climateactiontracker.org/ http://www.pbs.org/newshour/videos/#152200 http://ourchildrenstrust.org/sites/default/files/15.08.12.HansenExpertDecSupportingYouth.pdf http://ourchildrenstrust.org/event/698/press-release-americas-youth-file-landmark-climate-lawsuit-against-us-government-and-presi http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/summary-info/global/201507 http://www.wmo.int/media/news Visit the related web page
	The law is an essential tool for advancing women’s and girls’ rights by International Development Law Organization   The law is an essential tool for advancing women’s and girls’ rights and equality. A robust and effective legal system based on the rule of law is central to assisting women to become equal partners in decision-making and development.   Over the last couple of decades, the international community has invested substantially in programs aimed at strengthening the rule of law in developing countries. Despite this investment, the rule of law continues to mean very little for the vast majority of women and girls.   International Development Law Organization’s study Accessing Justice: Models, Strategies and Best Practices on Women’s Empowerment explores some of the challenges and solutions for women’s access to justice in diverse legal systems. It shows that women face structural and cultural barriers to accessing justice – insufficient knowledge of rights and remedies, illiteracy or poor literacy, and lack of resources or time to participate in justice processes.   This is all the more so as women usually have intensive family responsibilities. Even where women can access the formal justice sector, the outcomes of the process often fall far short of those envisaged by international standards, particularly with regard to property rights, inheritance, divorce and child custody, and spousal abuse.   Focusing on legal empowerment as a way to improve both access to justice and the quality of justice women receive, the study presents strategies and best practices in both formal and informal justice systems.   Legal empowerment approaches share one core concept: using the law to enable disadvantaged groups to access justice and realize basic rights. They include legal education; legal aid services; support for non-discriminatory dispute-resolution fora to complement or supplement informal systems; training of paralegals; and rights awareness.   In considering whether such approaches can improve the quality of justice women receive, Accessing Justice brings together a number of IDLO-sponsored case studies in Afghanistan, India, Namibia, Rwanda, Mozambique, Tanzania, Morocco, Papua New Guinea and the Solomon Islands.   These highlight a variety of lessons for development practitioners, both in terms of engagement with the informal legal sector and, more generally, for the use of legal empowerment and top-down / bottom-up strategies. In an appropriate context, carefully designed legal empowerment strategies may constitute a valuable contribution to improving women’s access to justice.   The case studies also confirm that programs designed to address women’s rights in informal justice systems remain a highly sensitive issue. These programs require thorough knowledge of the social, economic, and political context in which the informal system is operating. Moreover, legal empowerment approaches in both the formal and informal justice sectors are likely to be more sustainable when a) they are locally owned; and b) when they are coupled with top-down reforms to ensure domestic laws and regulations are in line with international legal standards on gender equality.   * Access the study (PDF 74pp) via the link below.   Discrimination against women is often justified in the name of culture. For 27 years, I have lent my voice to campaigns by women’s rights advocates, lawyers and other activists to end the unequal legal position of women and girls and to ban corporal punishments such as stoning, flogging or cutting off hands.   I have learnt from my work that to implement women’s rights on the ground we need to frame women’s demands in a language that is culturally appropriate and culturally persuasive. This study highlights the critical role legal empowerment strategies can play in changing and challenging oppressive gender relations that are justified under the name of culture.   By showcasing an impressive range of legal empowerment approaches in diverse geographical and cultural settings, the study indicates the value of empowering women, through efforts aimed at legal education, legal training, the provision of legal services and the creation of a space for women to question and negotiate discriminatory ‘cultural’ norms.   The initiatives presented in the study indicate that legal empowerment strategies can slowly pay long term dividends, by allowing women to claim power from those who rule in their name, rather than leaving reforms to the whims of the state and community decision-makers, whose interests often lie in the preservation of the status quo.   The key message of the study is that by empowering women to claim their rights, women are better equipped to bring about change in their communities. I am confident that when such projects are pursued in conjunction with legal and institutional reforms, we will finally make progress in making women’s rights a lived reality. - Shirin Ebadi, Human Rights Lawyer, Nobel Peace Laureate   http://www.idlo.int/ Visit the related web page
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