So, my ‘guardians for future generations’ event alongside Polly Higgins last night went very interestingly. The super-jury decided, on balance, that fracking would be against the basic interests / needs of future people…
Those of you who came last night will be aware that very unfortunately we could not make workable-Skype-contact with Sandor Fulop, the Hungarian Ombudsman for future generations. This morning, he emailed me this wonderful msg:
"I would have been eager to share and discuss with you some ideas about the two intriguing and high professional quality suggestions of the yesterday evening program.
As concerns your ideas, Rupert, I wanted to strongly second the idea of the group solution rather than nominating an individual as responsible for the protection of future generations. As concerns the veto right I would call it a last resort solution, while I would put the stress in the operation of the new organisation to deliberation, systematic and continuous networking, translating the trustable scientific findings into the language of the politicians, media and the general public (perhaps first of all through the bottom up community media). In the last 4 years in the FG Ombudsman office here in Hungary, our possibly most important lesson to learn was that a systematic clarification might change the flow of administrative decision-making and even could result in change of whole legal regimes with legislation and legal practice.
The 5th international crime idea of Polly's is brave and glamorous as well. Hearing the ideas of leading Club of Rome and Balaton Group (Dennis Meadows at al. - again the team and networking element bolstered with several decades long consequential development of their ideas!) we can be pretty sure that scarcity of energy resources, drinking water and arable lands will lead to mass migration and wars possibly much sooner that we - as a rule, deceiving ourselves in the most important but threatening subjects - can imagine and calculate with. Here in this second topic I have also an issue where I would shift the major stresses a little. I am inclined to see a continuum of the legal measures ranging from the individual criminal law responsibility, corporate criminal responsibility (that could be destroying and aiming different governing interests than the sole CEO-s which are interchangeable in many ways), to administrative measures and civil law responsibility for overusing externalias."
Polly Higgins also spoke very supportively about my idea.
Our next thought is to have a much fuller-scale ‘trial’. Taking perhaps a day or more…
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