WASHINGTON - Canadian activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier's zealous drive to cast global warming as a human rights issue will have an airing Thursday at a commission of the Organization of American States.
And while the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights can't compel the United States to do more to prevent climate change, just having the hearing is a victory, she said.
"We're really just happy about that," said the former chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council who's been nominated for the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize along with former U.S. vice-president Al Gore for wide-reaching environmental efforts.
"Ultimately, it would be great to have a ruling or a declaration. But we have influenced the global community."
"That alone is a win. The power lies in the attempt of a people to stand up for their rights."
And while the petition specifically targets the United States on the serious impact of global warming in the Arctic and the hemisphere, it keeps the pressure on countries like Canada, said Watt-Cloutier, who lives in Nunavut and has long represented some 150,000 Inuit in the Arctic.
"Canada has not got a very good track record, that's very well known," she said, blaming its spotty commitment on the politics of a minority government "trying to keep its job, rather than do its job."
It was Watt-Cloutier who first made the link between climate change and human rights at a 2003 United Nations conference.
She filed a petition with the OAS commission in December 2005 on the issue but it was dismissed. The group finally agreed last month to a hearing.
Watt-Cloutier will tell the panel about the people in Nunavut who are drowning because of melting glaciers and unstable ice and climbing suicide rates because the traditional hunting life has been so compromised.
"All that we're reaching out to is starting to melt," she told a news conference Wednesday.
"It's destroying a way of life. How could we not see this as a human rights issue?"
"The Arctic is an early warning for the rest of the world."
Over 180 coastal communities in the far north have been identified as requiring relocation in coming decades at a cost of more than US$400 billion.
But it's not just the Arctic coping with change. Glaciers are melting in South America at an unprecedented rate. Rising sea levels in the Caribbean and Central America are swallowing land and fresh water resources.
Martin Wagner, a lawyer for the environmental law firm Earthjustice, said inaction on climate change is breaking all sorts of international protections for indigenous people, including right to life, means of subsistence, preservation of health, culture and right to property and use of traditional lands.
As well, governments have a duty not to violate human rights and protect them from being violated by third parties.
Donald Goldberg, senior lawyer for the Center for International Environmental Law, said they'll ask the commission to endorse their view in a report that calls on countries to take action.
There should be rigorous followups, he said.
Goldberg noted the commission has helped protect countries like Nicaragua and Equador from environmental problems like unsustainable logging.
A finding by the group on the issue could be used by other countries for moral and legal pressure on the United States, said Wagner. "No nation wants international law to collapse," he said.
"I think it can have a powerful effect."
The United States has refused to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol to lower greenhouse gas emissions.
Five western U.S. states said this week they'll bypass President George W. Bush's administration and start their own regional pact aimed at reducing emissions that result in smog and are linked to global warming.
Canada's government has repeatedly said the Kyoto targets are unachievable without massive disruption to the economy.
Ottawa is working on regulations for heavy industry but these would depend on "intensity targets" which would allow emissions to continue rising.
In 2004, the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment, a four-year study by an international team of scientists, said the Arctic is warming much more rapidly than previously known, at nearly twice the rate as the rest of the globe.
Greenhouse gases are projected to make it warmer still, leading to major declines in summer sea ice, erosion, flooding and rising sea levels, challenging the survival of some animal species and indigenous people.
Last month, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded human pollution is "very likely" the cause of global warming.
