By: Staff Writer
May 6, 2022
The Executive Director of the Caribbean Community Climate Change Centre (CCCCC) believes that in the future the International Criminal Court (ICC) will be more involved in enforcement actions against polluters.
Dr Colin Young, told Caribbean Magazine Plus that “the reason is quite simple,” as to why the ICC has not been involved in prosecutions against companies that pollute up to this time and it is because when the Kyoto Protocol, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and particularly, when the “historic” Paris agreement was drafted, “197 countries would have agreed to it and ratified it, the mere fact that you had that many diverging interests, meant that you would not have arrived at such an international treaty had there been enforcement mechanisms for those who are most responsible.”
He continued, “So, they have negotiated an agreement that many of us felt that was the best that we could have gotten under the circumstances. Without having it fall apart, in terms of what we wanted.
“So that’s not to say that there aren’t efforts now that are happening, both domestically where you’ve heard of some of the litigation that has started, where young people in developed countries are taking their governments to court over this issue of carbon dioxide emissions; and so there are also initiatives where small island developing states are starting to look at whether or not they could approach the ICC to try to see whether or not they can establish some kind of damages against countries that are causing pollution.”
Whether or not CARICOM countries will muster up the courage to invoke the ICC into the climate change matrix is a work in progress. Dr Young added: “You should look at the chair at the OAS (Organisation of American States) is Antigua and Barbuda and you would remember that the Prime Minister (Gaston Brown) at the COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland where they would have launched this issue of trying to establish a commission to try to establish how best to proceed, looking at some form of criminal recourse or some kind of judicial recourse to the issue of historical pollution.”
Dr Young believes that criminal prosecution will be the “thing of the future” and become more commonplace as developing countries try to coax developed countries to take climate change and carbon emissions more seriously.
However, as developing countries are starting to ramp up efforts to corner developed countries into policing themselves, the matter now developing over the last 20 years is now developing countries are now polluting more, but not on the scale of developed countries obviously as outlined in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) sixth report. Dr Young suggests this phenomenon is something observers have to look at in “context” as he posits that developing countries are still nowhere near the level of pollution that developed countries in North America and Europe.
Moreover, readers of the IPCC sixth report should pay attention to the “historical source of carbon emissions” and understand that over the course of the years of how we have gotten to this “climate crisis” did not happen with developing countries at all.