Tag Archives: legal

Dutch Court orders Netherlands Government cut CO2 emissions by 25 percent by 2020 | Climate Citizen

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http://takvera.blogspot.com.au/2015/06/dutch-court-orders-netherlands.html

A Dutch court in a landmark legal case has just handed down a verdict that the Netherlands Government has the legal duty to take measures against #climate change. Further, the court ordered that a 25% reduction of CO2 emissions, based on 1990 levels, must be accomplished by 2020 by the Dutch government in accordance with IPCC scientific recommendations for industrial countries.

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Sue Higginson, Principal Solicitor for the Environmental Defenders Office (EDO) NSW, said that the same legal arguments are unlikely to be used in Australia, “Dutch civil laws are much more specific in their terms than Australian laws.” she said.

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With Australia, such a case would be much less straightforward as we do not have the incorporation of international human rights or general duty of care directly in our constitution or legal framework.

Corporate Personhood

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A few days ago I spotted a picture of a T-shirt (curious how that works these days) with the following phase:

Slavery is the legal fiction that a person is property.
Corporate personhood is the legal fiction that property is a person.

I believe that’s rather relevant, in many countries corporations are essentially regarded as people and have all kinds of rights that frequently get abused – this because a company is nothing like a person. The “free trade” agreements between countries provide sad but excellent examples of how corporate personhood goes wrong – I think free trade is a good idea, but right now it ends up only benefiting big corps to the detriment of everybody else including those who actually create/grow the value.

So about that phrase, I was kinda curious where it came from and it appears to originate from a study about 10 years ago by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), one resulting article suggesting to Abolish Corporate Personhood. Also see a timeline on personhood rights and powers.

There’s an insightful analysis in the article of how it all happened, as well as a review of the American constitution and its amendments in the context of people’s rights – the term democracy doesn’t appear, and the amendments merely deal with govt not being allowed to legislate against things, it does actually explicitly guarantee the freedoms that people often talk about. An interesting nuance.