A Global Pact for the Environment?

Last Saturday 24 June 2017, a meeting at the Grand Amphitheatre of the Sorbonne (Paris) presided by Laurent Fabius, President of the Constitutional Council of France and former President of the COP 21, discussed a draft project for a Global Pact for the Environment with a selective panel of experts and personalities who had gathered from all over the world. The initiative, promoted by the Club de juristes, a French think-tank, is ambitious. The idea is to work towards a global treaty, embedded in the United Nations complex of treaties, that would establish a row of procedural and material principles and rights that are indispensable for the protection of the environment. Thus, inter alia, the right to an ecologically sound environment, the principle of intergenerational equity, the prevention and precaution principles, the right of access to information and the right to public participation, the right of access to environmental justice, the principle of the protection of the resilience of ecosystems and the non-regression principle.

The President of the French Republic, Emmanuel Macron, to whom a copy of the draft project was given by former secretary-general of the United Nations Ban Ki-moon and Laurent Fabius, supports the initiative and committed to make it succeed.