Excerpt

On Rights and Responsibilities Forum contribution: Toward a Great Ethics Transition. Kathryn Sikkink, February 2020, Paper, "Brendan Mackey draws an interesting parallel between the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and the various declarations that have sought to establish a similar shared ethics in the environmental areas. I welcome his encouragement to reconsider one of the most important of these, the Earth Charter of 2000. Yet, it would seem that the Earth Charter has not yet played a similar role as the UDHR, nor does it hold the same place in the eyes of environmental activists as the UDHR does for human rights activists. I don’t understand the reason for this, but it appears that environmental activists may be less committed to such soft law declarations and charters. For a 2016 article, Emilie M. Hafner-Burton, Brad L. LeVeck, and David G. Victor interviewed 243 NGO activists, about half from human rights NGOs and half from environmental NGOs. The human rights activists thought the UDHR is just as powerful a tool for activists as the binding treaty protecting civil and political rights, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR). By contrast, the non-binding Rio Declaration had not yet achieved the same status in the environmental community, who believe that binding treaties are a more powerful tool for activists than non-binding declarations.1 The authors did not ask about the Earth Charter, but I doubt that it would have elicited a more positive response." Link