This UN judgment opens the door to permanent 'climate refugee' status
Article by Andrea Widburg in "The American Thinker":
Most of the people who enter America illegally do so for economic reasons. Of late, Progressives contend that the economic problems in poor countries are due to climate change. (Leftists claim that everything negative is due to climate change.) The U.N. has now issued a ruling holding within it the promise that anyone who claims climate change is a serious issue in the home country (and keep in mind that all future climate change damages are highly speculative) is a refugee who cannot be turned away.
The sad reality is that third-world countries have problems much greater than the Earth's ever-shifting climate. They are plagued by systemic corruption, socialism, theocratic tyrannies, centuries of endemic poverty and disease, and equally old cultural patterns inconsistent with modern wealth creation. That we may be entering another solar minimum cycle is the least of their worries.
But that's not how U.N. bureaucrats view the climate's effect on impoverished countries. Or rather, at the U.N., it doesn't matter whether climate change is real. What really matters is that climate change is a vehicle for wealth transference. A U.N. official affiliated with the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change freely admitted that "we redistribute de facto the world's wealth by climate policy."
The Guardian now reports on a U.N. judgment opening the door to saying to first-world countries that if people seek refuge in that country based upon the claim that they are escaping the effects of climate change, the host country may not repatriate that refugee:
It is unlawful for governments to return people to countries where their lives might be threatened by the climate crisis, a landmark ruling by the United Nations human rights committee has found.
The judgment — which is the first of its kind — represents a legal "tipping point" and a moment that "opens the doorway" to future protection claims for people whose lives and wellbeing have been threatened due to global heating, experts say.
The judgment relates to the case of Ioane Teitiota, a man from the Pacific nation of Kiribati, which is considered one of the countries most threatened by rising sea levels. He applied for protection in New Zealand in 2013, claiming his and his family's lives were at risk.
According to Teitiota, as islands in South Tarawa became uninhabitable, they were crowding onto his island. Moreover, he said, a lack of fresh water and an increasingly saline water table inhibited crop growth. Teitiota said Kiribati would be uninhabitable in 10 to 15 years, endangering his life.
The New Zealand courts rejected the claim, recognizing that the argument entirely erases borders between nations that are more prosperous and those that are less prosperous. The U.N. human rights committee actually backed that decision because it concluded that 10 to 15 years was a sufficient time for Kiribati to remediate the problem.
However, in the same opinion, the court left open other claims for people contending that they could not be forced to return to home countries affected by climate change:
The committee ruled that "the effects of climate change in receiving states may expose individuals to a violation of their rights ... thereby triggering the non-refoulement obligations of sending states".
[snip]
While the judgment is not formally binding on countries, it points to legal obligations that countries have under international law.
"What's really important here, and why it's quite a landmark case, is that the committee recognised that without robust action on climate at some point in the future it could well be that governments will, under international human rights law, be prohibited from sending people to places where their life is at risk or where they would face inhuman or degrading treatment," said Prof Jane McAdam, director of the Kaldor centre for international refugee law at the University of New South Wales.
"Even though in this particular case there was no violation found, it effectively put governments on notice.
One can only wonder how long it will be before illegal aliens in America start contending that climate change has made it impossible to earn a living in their home countries, entitling them to stay in America.
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