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UNITED NATIONS - As the United Nations takes an increasingly dominant role in guiding the climate change debate, there is renewed interest in a longstanding proposal for the creation of an international court to try environmental crimes.
But some diplomats and environmentalists are skeptical whether such a court will have the political support of the overwhelming majority of the U.N.'s 192 member states for it to be a reality.
"It took ages for the creation of an international war crimes tribunal," says one Third World diplomat, "and a world court for environmental crimes can take generations."
Satish Kumar, an avowed environmentalist and editor of the London-based environmental magazine Resurgence, is a strong advocate of such a court.
"We have no right to make waste," he argues. "And if I dump my waste on your house, it's a crime. You can take me to court."
"But if we put our waste on nature, nature can't take us to court? Nature should have a right to take us to court. And the United Nations should establish a nature court," Kumar told IPS.
He pointed out that environmental crimes -- from the dumping of toxic wastes to the military destruction of natural resources -- should be deemed "crimes against nature".
Dr. Franoise Burhenne-Guilmin, senior counsel at the Environmental Law Centre of the Switzerland-based International Union for the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN), thinks the proposal may hit legal and logistical snags.
"IUCN has never taken a formal position on this matter, but members of the Commission on Environmental Law (CEL) have discussed the issue in the past," he told IPS.
He pointed out that the idea of a specific international court for environmental crimes was not supported by the CEL on the basis that they thought it would not be feasible.
"To establish such a court, people would need to agree on what constitutes an environmental crime," Burhenne-Guilmin said.
Even if such a court were established, the rules which would have to be put in place in order for it to function would be very difficult to agree on, he added.
In recent years, some of the cases involving "environmental damages" have been tried in local courts because of the absence of an international judicial body.
A landmark environmental case involved the spilling of over 11 million gallons of crude oil when the oil tanker Valdez hit a reef. A court in Anchorage, Alaska, awarded a record five billion dollars in damages to some 34,000 fishermen whose livelihoods were affected by the oil spill spread over 1,500 miles of the Alaskan coastline.
The award was later reduced by half by a U.S. appeals court. The damages were against Exxon Mobil Corporation, which appealed the ruling at several judicial levels.
And more recently, a privately owned commodity trader was fined about 200 million dollars for dumping toxic waste off the coast of Cote d'Ivoire. The payment was described as one of the largest for environmental damage in Africa.
Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), told reporters last week that dramatic changes in consumer lifestyles could make a great difference, "though that did not mean that humankind had to go back to the stone age".
Rather, he said, it was time to start evaluating "the size of the footprint that humans were imposing on ecosystems through carbon dioxide emissions and other impacts."
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