People’s Tribunal to Assess Fracking and Human Rights

When the state no longer enforces its own legal standards on human rights or ecological protection, often in deference to corporate partners, the logical response is to establish a commons-based alternative – a people’s tribunal. That’s what is now planned in the case of fracking and its implications for human rights.

The Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal (PPT) has scheduled a session in March 2017 to “consider whether sufficient evidence exists to indict certain named States on charges of failing adequately to respect the human rights of citizens as a result of permitting, and failing to adopt a precautionary approach to, hydraulic fracturing and other techniques of unconventional oil and gas extraction within their jurisdictions.”  The Tribunal is an internationally recognized public opinion tribunal functioning independently of state authorities and operating out of Rome. The Tribunal will hold a week of hearings in both the US and UK.

Governments take great pains to prevent their most sacrosanct policies from being questioned in courts of law.  Consider how the US Government short-circuited any significant court rulings about the NSA’s extensive secret surveillance of citizens, in violation of the Fifth Amendment.  It took Edward Snowden's revelations to force judicial review. 

We’ve been here before, of course. The lawless Vietnam War was a prime example. As a corrective to the state crimes committed in that instance, philosopher Bertrand Russell and Jean Paul Sartre organized the Vietnam War Crimes Tribunal in 1967 to hear evidence about violations of the citizen’s basic human rights. In that tradition, today’s PPT will assess the human rights implications of fracking.

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The European Parliament Focuses on Commons

The European Parliament is formally focusing on the commons paradigm through a new “Intergroup on common goods,” which is part of a larger group known as the "European Parliamentary Intergroup on Common Goods and Public Services."  The group met for the first time on May 26 in Brussels, at the European Parliament.  At this early stage, it’s hard to tell if it will be influential either within the European Parliament or with the public, but it certainly represents a significant new threshold for commons activism. 

Intergroups are official forums of the Parliament at which members, political organizations and movements can air their views and try to rally attention to a given topic. As Sophie Bloemen of the Commons Network writes:

Even though the intergroups have no legislative power, they can be valuable having such a representation in the European Parliament. At the minimum, it is a multiparty forum where one can exchange views and propose ideas on particular subjects in an informal way. Those who choose to work with such an intergroup, its Members of Parliament, and civil society or lobbyists, share the notion that a certain topic is important and can focus on how to get things done.

Now there will also be a Commons Intergroup. This particular group will allow for discussions on policy from a shared perspective: the idea that “the commons” – is an important and helpful way of framing the important themes of present times. As there can only be so many Intergroups, inevitably the group is the result of a political compromise. It has been formed by Members of the European Parliament from the Greens, the left group GUE, the large Social Democrat party (S&D) and the group EFDD which now includes Beppe Grillo with his Cinque Stelle party. The movement on water as a commons has been instrumental for the mobilization of the intergroup. 

For political reasons, the Commons Intergroup is one of two subgroups of the European Parliamentary intergroup on Common Goods and Public Services. MEP Marisa Matias from GUE is the president of the Commons Intergroup.

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Property Rights, Inequality and Commons

I recently spoke at a conference, “Property and Inequality in the 21st Century,” hosted by The Common Core of European Private Law, an annual gathering of legal scholars, mostly from Europe.  They had asked me how the commons might be a force for reducing inequality.  Below are my remarks, “The Commons as a Tool for Sharing the Wealth.”  The conference was held at the University of Göteborg, Sweden, on June 12-13, 2015.

Thank you for inviting me to speak today about the relationship between property law and inequality – a topic that receives far too little attention.  This should not be surprising.  Now that free-market ideology has become the default worldview and political consensus around the world, private property is seen as synonymous with freedom, economic growth and human progress. 

Oh yes, there is this nasty side issue known as inequality.  Malcontents like the Occupy movement and renegade economists like Thomas Pikketty have brought this problem to the fore after years of neglect.  Their success has been quite an achievement because for years the very existence of inequality has been portrayed as an accident, an aberration, a mysterious and shadowy guest at the grand banquet of human progress. 

I wish to argue that hunger, poverty, inadequate education and medical care, and assaults on human dignity and human rights, are not bugs in the system.  They are features.  Indeed, market ideologues often argue that such deprivations are a necessary incentive to human enterprise and economic growth; poverty is supposedly needed to spur people to escape through the work ethic and entrepreneurialism. 

Property rights lie at the heart of this dynamic because they are a vital tool for defining and patrolling the boundaries of private wealth, and for justifying the inevitably unequal outcomes.  So it’s important that we focus on the role of property rights in producing social inequality – without ignoring the many other forces, including social practice, culture and politics, that also play important roles.

I’d like to focus on the obsession in modern industrial societies to propertize everything, including life itself, and to use law as a tool to impose a social order of markets and private property as expansively as possible.  This cultural reflex is known as the enclosure of the commons.  The term describes how property owners assert sweeping rights – often with the active complicity of governments – as a way to appropriate collectively owned resources for private gain. 

We can see this dynamic in the international land grab now underway, the incessant attempts to privatize groundwater and municipal water systems, the grotesque expansion of copyright and patent law to privatize scientific knowledge and cultural works, and the use of the Earth’s atmosphere as a free waste dump by polluters.  The mania for privatizing the world has reached such an extreme stage that even intangible wealth as public spaces, microorganisms, genetically created mammals, artificially created nanomatter and human consciousness itself are claimed as objects of private property rights.  

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The Rise of Biocultural Rights

Can law be used to protect and advance the commons?  One of the most promising new developments here is a new jurisprudence of “biocultural rights.” Biocultural rights represent a bold new departure in human rights law that recognizes the importance of a community’s stewardship over lands and waters.  Instead of focusing on individual rights and private property, biocultural rights explicitly recognize a community’s identity, culture, governance system, spirituality and way of life as embedded in a specific landscape.  In other words, it recognizes the existence of a commons. 

The history and character of biocultural rights are wonderfully explained in a recent law review article in the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment.  The article, “Community Stewardship:  The Foundation of Biocultural Rights,”  is by Kabir Sanjay Bavkiatte, a cofounder of Natural Justice, an international collective of environmental lawyers, and Thomas Bennett, a professor at the university of Cape Town, South Africa. (Vol. 6, No. 1, March 2015, pp. 7-29)

Here’s an abstract of the article:

The term ‘biocultural rights’ denotes a community's long established right, in accordance with its customary laws, to steward its lands, waters and resources. Such rights are being increasingly recognized in international environmental law. Biocultural rights are not simply claims to property, in the typical market sense of property being a universally commensurable, commodifiable and alienable resource; rather, as will be apparent from the discussion offered here, biocultural rights are collective rights of communities to carry out traditional stewardship roles vis-à-vis Nature, as conceived of by indigenous ontologies.

Certain core principles lie at the heart of biocultural rights, write Bavkiatte and Bennett.  These include “non-discrimination, protection of cultural integrity, self-government, title to lands and natural resources, together with social welfare for economic well-being.” 

The authors concede that “international lawyers have undertaken little or no research into the development of biocultural rights” – something that this article sets out to rectify. They argue persuasively, however, that these rights have clearly surfaced in a variety of international covenants, declarations, conventions and codes of conduct. 

Biocultural rights as a new field of law have not emerged magically on their own, but through the convergence of four interrelated movements that have contributed important ethical principles, legal concepts and political advocacy.  Together, these movements have brought the idea of biocultural rights into sharp focus. 

The four movements identified by the authors consist of:

“post-development” advocates who are articulating a vision for human society beyond the discredited neoliberal paradigm;

the commons movement that rejects the “tragedy” fable and empirically demonstrates the effectiveness of local self-governance;

the movement of indigenous peoples asserting their right to self-determination, cultural heritage and stewardship of the land; and

the push for a “third generation” of environmental human rights that go beyond basic civil and political rights (first generation) and socio-economic and cultural rights (second generation), to recognize community rights to self-determination, economic and social development, cultural heritage and a clean and healthy environment.

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Recognizing a Human Right to the Commons

(I am back from some time at the beach, ready to resume my reporting about the latest commons developments, of which there are many.  More to come!)

Dutch legal scholar Femke Wijdekop of the Institute for Environmental Security has tackled an urgent question for anyone concerned with planetary environment.  She writes: 

How can we construct a right to a healthy and clean environment that is enforceable in today’s complex international legal order? What legal construct would be visionary and ambitious enough to meet the urgent need for environmental justice and protection and at the same time be enforceable in court rather than fall into the category of ‘soft law’?

Wijdekop answers these questions in an essay, “A Human Right to Commons- and Rights-based Ecological Governance:  the key to a healthy and clean environment?” The legal analysis was published by the Earth Law Alliance, a group of lawyers organized by British lawyer Lisa Mead who advocate an eco-centric approach to law. 

Wijdekop’s piece draws upon some of the ideas in my book with Burns Weston, Green Governance in arguing for “procedural environmental rights to establish, maintain, participate in, be informed about and seek redress for ecological commons.”  She has presented these ideas to international lawyers and constitutional scholars in The Hague, and is now reaching out to environmentally minded lawyers.

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Advancing a New Legal Architecture to Support the Ecological Commons

This is the last in a series of six essays by Professor Burns Weston and me, derived from our book Green Governance:  Ecological Survival, Human Rights and the Law of the Commonspublished by Cambridge University Press. The essays originally appeared on CSRWire. I am re-posting them here to introduce the paperback edition, which was recently released.

In our preceding essays in this series, we introduced the idea of Green Governance, a new approach to environmental protection based on a broad synthesis of economics and human rights and, critically, the commons. We also described the burgeoning global commons movement, which is demonstrating a wide range of innovative, effective models of Green Governance.

In our final post, we'd like to focus on how a vision of Green Governance could be embodied into law. If a new paradigm shift to Green Governance is going to become a reality, state law and policy must formally recognize the countless commons that now exist and the new ones that must be created.

Recognizing the Commons as a Legal Entity

Yet here’s the rub: Because the “law of the commons” is a qualitatively different type Green Governanceof law – one that recognizes social and ecological relationships and the value of nature beyond the marketplace – it is difficult to rely upon the conventional forms of state, national and international law. After all, conventional law generally privileges individual over group rights, as well as commercial activities and economic growth above all else.

Establishing formal recognition for commons- and rights-based law is therefore a complicated proposition. We must consider, for example, how self-organized communities of commoners can be validated as authoritative forms of resource managers. How can they maintain themselves, and what sort of juridical relationship can they have with conventional law? One must ask, too, which existing bodies of law can be modified and enlarged to facilitate the workings of actual commons.

 Threee Domains of Commons Law

Clearly there must be a suitable architecture of law and public policy to support and guide the growth of commons and a new Commons Sector. In our book Green Governance, we propose innovations in law and policy in three distinct domains:

  • General internal governance principles and policies that can guide the development and management of commons;
  • Macro-principles and policies that facilitate the formation and maintenance of “peer governance;”
  • Catalytic legal strategies to validate, protect, and support ecological commons.

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Fixing the Law’s Bias Against Sharing

In the quest to imagine and build a new “sharing economy,” one factor that is often overlooked is law.  What shall be the role of formal law in a world of social enterprises, shared workspaces, cohousing, car-sharing groups, tool-lending libraries, local currencies and crowdfunding?  Who has legal rights in these various contexts, and what do they look like?  Who holds the legal liabilities?

These questions are sometimes ignored by commoners who consider the law a retrograde, irrelevant force to be avoided.  But even among those who acknowledge the inescapability of conventional law, the contours of legal rights and liabilities are not always self-evident because the law tends to be silent about commoning, or construes such activities in archaic legal categories. The law as it now stands presumes that we are either businesses or consumers, employers or employees, or landlords and tenants.  Production and consumption, and investment and usage, are "naturally" considered separate activities pursued by different people. 

But nowadays countless activities in the sharing economy are blurring old categories of law. There may be many parties involved in managing a a workspace, childcare facility or online information, or perhaps many people have ongoing relationships and responsibilities and entitlements that are collective and evolving. Should the strict letter of the (archaic) law necessarily trump our informal, self-negotiated social rules? 

Janelle Orsi, director of the Oakland-based Sustainable Economies Law Center, has tackled these and many other such questions in a terrific book, Practicing Law in the Sharing Economy:  Helping People Build Cooperatives, Social Enterprise and Local Sustainable Economies (ABA Publishing).  The book covers a monumental array of legal topics that are relevant to the sharing economy.  Most of the chapters deal with how to craft agreements that validate special forms of sharing – for example, how to form organizations, how to exchange with each other and how to invest in each other’s work.  There are also chapters for shared working arrangements, mutual provisioning, sharing rights to land, sharing rights to intellectual property, and managing collective risks.  

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The Commons and the Legal Left at Harvard Law School

Can the boundary-bursting categories of the commons penetrate the mighty citadel of Harvard Law School and its entrenched ways of thinking about property, markets and law?  I set out to find out last Saturday at the “This Land Is Your Land:  Remaking Property After Neoliberalism” conference.  The one-day event was convened by Unbound, the Harvard Law journal of the legal left, and the Institute for Global Law and Policy.  I had been invited to participate on a panel, “From Homo Economicus to Commoner” and to explore with about 100 students and a few professors how “the left” might approach property rights in some new ways.

The liberal/leftist luminary Duncan Kennedy, a founder of the critical legal studies movement and an advisor to Unbound, opened the day with a talk about “property as fetish and tool.”  He explained how both the right and the left have their own versions of property fetishism.  The right has adopted highly naturalistic arguments that regard property as an entirely natural, ahistorical reality.  An example is the right’s imposition of intellectual property rights on countries of the global South. 

The left, meanwhile, generally regards property law as a “bundle of rights” that is principled and conceptually coherent when it is in fact, he pointed out, simply an incoherent accretion of laws that reflect countless political struggles of the past.  The problem with the left, Kennedy suggested, is that it does not have an alternative conception of property law except as a useful tool of left political projects, such as better housing and social conditions.  Kennedy implied that it was futile for the left to try to get “outside” of property discourse.

Fortunately, Michael Hardt of Duke University – author of Empire and Commonwealth, among other books –objected.  He argued that we need to develop a conception of property that lets us think outside of standard property discourse and property relationships.  But is this possible and desireable?  Conference participants disagreed, and came back to the topic many times throughout the day.

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Joseph Sax’s Quest: Legal Protection for Collective Interests

Joseph Sax’s illustrious career in the law should be remembered for the importance of blending visionary thinking with rigorous scholarship. At a time when private property rights were the only serious framework for managing air, water, land and seas, Professor Sax single-handedly breathed new life into the public trust doctrine with his seminal 970 law review article. Sax died on Sunday, which prompts these reflections on the far-reaching effects of his creative legal scholarship.

In the late 1960s, as a professor at the University of Colorado teaching courses on mining, water and oil and gas law, Sax realized that all of it was oriented towards the maximal private exploitation of natural resources.  He asked:  “How come there’s no public dimension to natural resource law, and the public who uses these areas and actually owns most of them doesn’t have a say in what goes on?”

His answer, in 1970, was “The Public Trust Doctrine in Natural Resource Law:  Effective Judicial Intervention,” in the Michigan Law Review -- a piece that went on to become one of the most influential law review articles ever.

The essay looked to Roman law, English common law and a handful of U.S. Supreme Court rulings to declare that the “public trust doctrine” empowers courts to intervene in government and market actions to protect citizens' sovereign interests. The basic idea is that the government does not own natural resources; it is merely a trustee who must act on behalf of the unorganized public to protect their interests and those of future generations who cannot yet represent their interests in court.

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Mary Wood’s Crusade to Reinvigorate the Public Trust Doctrine

In her brilliant new book, Mary Christina Wood, a noted environmental law scholar at the University of Oregon, Eugene, courageously sweeps aside the bland half-truths and evasions about environmental law.  In Nature’s Trust:  Environmental Law for a New Ecological Age (Cambridge University Press), Wood argues:  “That ancient membrane of law that supposedly functions as a system of community restraint [is] now tattered and pocked with holes.”  Our current regulatory system will never solve our problems.  She continues:

"A major source of administrative dysfunction arises from the vast discretion [environmental] agencies enjoy – and the way they abuse it to serve private, corporate and bureaucratic interests.  As long as the decision-making frame presumes political discretion to allow damage, it matters little what new laws emerge, for they will develop the same bureaucratic sinkholes that consumed the 1970s laws.  Only a transformational approach can address sources of legal decay."

Wood’s mission in Nature’s Trust is to propose a new legal framework to define and carry out government’s ecological obligations.  For Wood, a huge opportunity awaits in reinvigorating the public trust doctrine, a legal principle that goes back millennia.  She explains how the doctrine could and should guide a dramatically new/old approach to protecting land, water, air and wildlife. 

In 1970, Professor Joseph Sax inaugurated a new era of legal reforms based on the public trust doctrine with a famous law review article.  For a time, Sax’s essay sparked energetic litigation to protect and reclaim waters that belong to everyone.  The focus was especially on beachfronts, lakes and riverbanks, and on wildlife.  But as new environmental statutes were enacted, some courts and scholars began to balk and backtrack and hedge.  They complained that the public trust doctrine should take a backseat to environmental statutes.  Or that the doctrine should apply only to states.  Or that it applies only to water and wildlife, and not to other ecological domains.  And so on.

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