Skip to main content

Last night at the GUARDIAN

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…

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Reasonable manners, in the blogosphere

Dear readers of Rupert's Read; One thing I am pleased about about this blog is that when we have had debates or disagreements here, they have virtually always been good-tempered. Because the norm out there in the blogosphere is often not like that. Take 'Comment is Free', for example, on the Guardian Unlimited site: the level of debate on CIF is pretty awful, frankly, in terms of civility. It is a very unpleasant place to take part in any debate, generally, unless perhaps (as most commenters do) one hides behind the veil of anonymity (which 'ain't allowed' here). And the truth is, in case any fellow commenters reading this don't realise it, that there are many many people who get put off even reading (let alone posting to) CIF because of the volume of plain nasty comments that they risk getting, when they do. I am slightly singling out CIF here, because I believe that this is actually one of the worst places on the blogosphere in terms of this kind of ...

Medialens under the lens, over Syria and Libya: Becoming the new Dave Sparts?

I have long been an active supporter of Medialens ( http://www.medialens.org/ ). Like many others, I have supported them with money, time, tips, and I have been proud to have done so. For they have done very important groundbreaking work over the years challenging the inanities and distortions of the 'mainstream' media. They have for example written important critiques of mainstream media coverage of dangerous climate change, of Iraq Body Count, of the corporate nature of most of our media, and much more besides. They have held the corporate media to account time and again. They ought to be saluted for all of that. It is therefore with a sense of deep regret (as well as of some foreboding) that I have finally to write to address the ways in which, lately, some of the wheels seem to be coming off their wagon. An early warning sign perhaps was their long-running spat with George Monbiot, over the Rwandan genocide and the terrible atr...