Eskimos Seek to Recast Global Warming as a Rights Issue
By Andrew C. Revkin
The New York Times
Wednesday 15 December 2004
The Eskimos, or Inuit, about 155,000 seal-hunting peoples scattered
around the Arctic, plan to seek a ruling from the Inter-American
Commission on Human Rights that the United States, by contributing
substantially to global warming, is threatening their
existence.
The Inuit plan is part of a broader shift in the debate over
human-caused climate change evident among participants in the 10th
round of international talks taking place in Buenos Aires aimed at
averting dangerous human interference with the climate
system.
Inuit leaders said they planned to announce the effort at the
climate meeting today.
Representatives of poor countries and communities - from the Arctic
fringes to the atolls of the tropics to the flanks of the Himalayas
- say they are imperiled by rising temperatures and seas through no
fault of their own. They are casting the issue as no longer simply
an environmental problem but as an assault on their basic human
rights.
The commission, an investigative arm of the Organization of
American States, has no enforcement powers. But a declaration that
the United States has violated the Inuit's rights could create the
foundation for an eventual lawsuit, either against the United
States in an international court or against American companies in
federal court, said a number of legal experts, including some
aligned with industry.
Such a petition could have decent prospects now that industrial
countries, including the United States, have concluded in recent
reports and studies that warming linked to heat-trapping smokestack
and tailpipe emissions is contributing to big environmental changes
in the Arctic, a number of experts said.
Last month, an assessment of Arctic climate change by 300
scientists for the eight countries with Arctic territory, including
the United States, concluded that "human influences" are now the
dominant factor.
Inuit representatives attending the conference said in telephone
interviews that after studying the matter for several years with
the help of environmental lawyers they would this spring begin the
lengthy process of filing a petition by collecting videotaped
statements from elders and hunters about the effects they were
experiencing from the shrinking northern icescape.
The lawyers, at EarthJustice, a nonprofit San Francisco law firm,
and the Center for International Environmental Law, in Washington,
said the Inter-American Commission, which has a record of treating
environmental degradation as a human rights matter, provides the
best chance of success. The Inuit have standing in the Organization
of American States through Canada.
Sheila Watt-Cloutier, the elected chairwoman of the Inuit
Circumpolar Conference, the quasi-governmental group recognized by
the United Nations as representing the Inuit, said the biggest fear
was not that warming would kill individuals but that it would be
the final blow to a sturdy but suffering culture.
"We've had to struggle as a people to keep afloat, to keep our
indigenous wisdom and traditions," she said. "We're an adaptable
people, but adaptability has its limits.
"Something is bound to give, and it's starting to give in the
Arctic, and we're giving that early warning signal to the rest of
the world."
If the Inuit effort succeeds, it could lead to an eventual stream
of litigation, somewhat akin to lawsuits against tobacco companies,
legal experts said.
The two-week convention, which ends Friday, is the latest session
on two climate treaties: the 1992 framework convention on climate
change and the Kyoto Protocol, an addendum that takes effect in
February and for the first time requires most industrialized
countries to curb such emissions.
The United States has signed both pacts and is bound by the 1992
treaty, which requires no emissions cuts. But the Bush
administration opposes the mandatory Kyoto treaty, saying it could
harm the economy and unfairly excuses big developing countries from
obligations.
That situation makes the United States particularly vulnerable to
such suits, environmental lawyers said.
By embracing the first treaty and signing the second, it has
acknowledged that climate change is a problem to be avoided; but by
subsequently rejecting the Kyoto pact, the lawyers said, it has not
shown a commitment to stemming its emissions, which constitute a
fourth of the global total.
The American delegation at the Buenos Aires conference declined to
comment on Tuesday on the petition or the arguments behind it.
"Until the Inuit have presented a complaint, we are not responding
to that issue," a State Department official said. "When they do, we
will look at what they have to say, consider it and then
respond."
Christopher C. Horner, a lawyer for the Cooler Heads Coalition, an
industry-financed group opposed to cutting the emissions, said the
chances of success of such lawsuits had risen lately.
From his standpoint, he said, "The planets are aligned very
poorly."
Delegates who flew to the conference from the Arctic's far-flung
communities, where retreating sea ice imperils traditional seal
hunts, said they planned to meet in Buenos Aires with
representatives from small-island nations that could eventually be
swamped by rising seas, swelled by meltwater from shrinking
glaciers and Arctic ice sheets.
Enele S. Sopoaga, the ambassador to the United Nations from Tuvalu,
a 15-foot-high nation of wave-pounded atolls halfway between
Australia and Hawaii, said he still saw legal efforts as a last
resort.
Tuvalu had threatened to sue the United States two years ago in the
International Court of Justice, but held off for a variety of
reasons.