DS Director Scott Leckie gave the opening address to a seminar on climate displacement at Utrecht University in the Netherlands, jointly hosted on 4 October 2018 by DS, LANDac and Utrecht University. The meeting explored ongoing activities to prevent and repair climate displacement and urged governments everywhere, including the Netherlands, to elaborate and strengthen policies designed to better tackle this growing global crisis. As a result of the meeting, DS will host several MSc students to carry out field research in February 2019 in several key climate displacement hotspots including Bangladesh, Fiji and Panama. A report of the seminar is available here: Climate displacement seminar report.
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Two Amazing Guests on Two New Podcasts - Listen Now!
Land Grabbing as an Internationally Wrongful Act - NEW DS Report on Ending Land Grabbing in Myanmar
Read this book!!!
New DS Report (!) - Courtrooms and Climate Change
Two Amazing Guests on Two New Podcasts - Listen Now!
Please have a listen to Episodes 24 and 25 of the podcast Jointly Venturing - Let's Talk World Citizenship hosted by DS Director and Founder, Scott Leckie. In Episode 24 we speak with the UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Internally Displaced Persons, Cecelia Jimenez-Damary, about her extraordinary efforts to assist the growing IDP populations scattered across the planet. In Episode 25, which has just been released, we speak with the world's leading judge responsible for some of the most important climate change cases to reach courtrooms to date, New Zealander Bruce Burson. Please tune in here to have a listen - https://open.spotify.com/show/5ltnbn1Hdy2T80ul0HNrsU - as well as iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher and Apple Podcasts. Better yet, subscribe, follow and write a review - it really helps! Episode 26 will be recorded this week where we host the world renowned 'Dictator Hunter', Reed Brody. Be sure to tune in!...
Land Grabbing as an Internationally Wrongful Act - NEW DS Report on Ending Land Grabbing in Myanmar
DS has just published a major 184-page legal report on the land grabbing in Myanmar and how these processes constitute internationally wrongful acts. The report includes a 21-step legal roadmap to end land grabbing once and for in Myanmar, a nation that is one of the worst in the world in Although the general power of States to compulsorily acquire, expropriate or otherwise confiscate or 'grab' land, homes and properties is legislatively recognised in virtually all national legal systems, to be lawful these processes generally carry with them five fundamental pre-conditions. Namely, when housing, land or property rights are revoked or limited through these processes, this can only be carried out when the taking concerned is: 1) subject to law and due process; 2) subject to the general principles of international law; 3) in the interest of society and not for the benefit of another private party; 4) proportionate, reasonable and subject to a fair balance test between the cost and the aim sought; and 5) subject to the provision of just and satisfactory compensation. In all countries, the act of compulsorily acquiring land is highly regulated and something which rights-respecting governments are often reluctant…...
Read this book!!!
Congratulations to long-time DS associate Dr. Khaled Hassine on his new book Handling Climate Displacement! Recently published by Cambridge University Press, this excellent book delves into all of the key issues on climate displacement, with a focus on how the Peninsula Principles on Climate Displacement Within States (2013) can play a key role in preventing and resolving this global crisis. This is a valuable book by a truly fine human being and I encourage everyone to read it and share it with your friends, family, colleagues. Not a bad cover photo, too..... ...
New DS Report (!) - Courtrooms and Climate Change
New DS Report (!) - Courtrooms and Climate Change: The Current State of Play - Global attention to the question of climate change, including climate displacement, has expanded dramatically over the 15 years since Displacement Solutions initiated our efforts to find concrete, rights-based and land-based solutions to this crisis. One area, in particular, that has seen considerable advancement in recent years is the growing scope of judicial attention to various aspects of the climate change question, spanning international, regional and national institutions. More than 1,500 cases have been filed addressing various aspects of the climate crisis over the past several years, and as a result, a rapidly growing body of case law is emerging from judicial organs that collectively give a sense of which climate change issues adjudicative bodies are willing to address, as well as the extent to which such judicial (and quasi-judicial) decisions are having a real world impact on the environmental and human impacts of global warming and all of its effects. Our new 218-page report - Courtrooms and Climate Change: The Current State of Play - explores some of the leading cases decided thus far and how judges and lawyers in countries as diverse as the Netherlands,…...