Photo: Club des Juristes

The 93rd IUCN Council Meeting convened at IUCN Headquarters in Gland (Switzerland) on 19-21 November and adopted the following decision concerning the Global Pact for the Environment:

“The Council,

On the recommendation of the Programme and Policy Committee:

Welcomes the initiative of the Global Pact for the Environment, which recognizes and builds on the leadership of IUCN in promoting the environmental rule of law, including the World Charter for Nature (1982), which celebrated its 35th anniversary on 28 October 2017,

and

Requests WCEL to continue its work to contribute to the drafting and development of the Global Pact and asks the Director General to use IUCN’s convening power to provide a platform in order to facilitate discussion.”

Following adoption of the decision, IUCN President Zhang Xinsheng stated that “Despite decades of progress, the planet continues to lose biodiversity at unprecedented levels. Today, a legally binding entity is needed. IUCN brings together knowledge and science, and with the Environmental Law Programme, is also at the forefront of environmental law. It is well placed to play a key role in helping develop a Global Pact for the Environment."

IUCN Director General Inger Andersen added that “The Global Pact for the Environment will bring together the defining principles of international environmental law, many of which IUCN actually contributed to developing over the past decades. I am very proud that our Council has decided to offer IUCN’s expertise, notably through WCEL, to continue developing the Global Pact for the Environment and to facilitate the necessary dialogue between interested parties. IUCN is uniquely placed as a membership organization, uniting States, government agencies, NGOs and Indigenous People’s Organizations, to channel the voice of civil society into the negotiation of an international treaty.”

The Global Pact for the Environment aims to serve as a legally binding “umbrella text” under the United Nations that synthesizes the principles outlined in the Stockholm Declaration, the World Charter for Nature, the Rio Declaration, the IUCN World Declaration on the Environmental Rule of Law, and other instruments to solidify the environmental rule of law around the world and to achieve the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In doing so, the Global Pact will act as a third international Covenant, codifying the principles enshrined in the Rio Declaration just as the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, both ratified in 1966, did for the Universal Declaration on Human Rights of 1949.  Such a Pact would achieve three main objectives:

1. Establish the universal right to an ecologically sound environment as a human right at the international level, able to be invoked in international, regional, and national courts of law;
2. Unify the guiding principles of international environmental law in one internally coherent legal document, thereby clarifying points of tension in international environmental law that have arisen given the existing sectoral approach to governance; and
3. Empower citizens to hold home and neighbor governments accountable for their environmental policies.

If this is achieved, the Global Pact for the Environment will greatly expand the rights of those suffering from environmental harms, allow and incent states and civil society to better hold polluters accountable, and lay the foundation for the incorporation of environmental concerns in all international governance, as is done for other human rights.