Lhe COP30 opens on November 10 in Brazil. We have already announced the failure. European countries are struggling to find a common position, the United States will not deliver “high level representative”according to the White House, and the funding issue is increasingly dividing poor and rich countries. Since COP21 ten years ago, the COP process seemed to be running empty. Neither has achieved major progress, either in terms of state commitment or funding.
The administration of Donald Trump in the United States or the government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil have shown how little progress can become fragile in the face of political regime change. But the political and legal framework for environmental protection is old. At least we can trace it back to the Stockholm conference which in 1972 acknowledged this “Humans are both creatures and creators of their environment”. Since then, five major conferences on the Stockholm model have been held, as well as 29 COPs discussing climate, 16 conferences on biodiversity, and 29 conferences on desertification.
How can we explain that this edifice is so fragile, despite intensive international mobilization? There are many obvious reasons: because decisions are not binding, because they are only theoretical, but in practice, there are no sanctions for failure, because countries remain sovereign and can withdraw from the agreement at any time, because the North-South divide makes climate justice a difficult problem to address… All of this is true, but these reasons are only multifaceted manifestations of a more fundamental problem.
The slow development of the idea of human rights, from the Enlightenment to the establishment of international jurisdiction at the end of the Second World War, provides an example of a edifice built on the same constraints, but apparently much more robust. Of course, there have been many failures to respect human rights, but principles have been shared, jurisdiction has been established and recognized. This platform is a space for dialogue, exclamation, even anger, that resonates globally today. This is not enough to guarantee universal respect for rights, but it makes it possible to highlight and qualify deficiencies, thereby exerting ethical pressure on violators.
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