At the Social Summit, 6 to 13 December in Madrid, there were several meetings to inform and mobilize around the ratification and implementation of the Escazú Agreement. The Escazú Agreement is the first environmental human rights treaty in Latin America and the Caribbean.
It develops Principle 10 of the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, which seeks to ensure access to information, citizen participation and access to justice in environmental matters and provides special protections for environmental human rights defenders. After six years of negotiations, it was approved in March 2018.
Latin American NGOs and Indigenous people from various countries in the Region led the information and mobilization meetings about the Escazu Agreement in the Social Summit. Indigenous people presented their experience, including how some of their colleagues were killed while protecting the forest and Indigenous territories against extraction industries.
The Escazú Agreement incorporates several innovative elements. First, it has a specific provision on environmental human rights defenders (HRDs) that is unprecedented in the region. Second, it enshrines a rights-based approach toward indigenous peoples and vulnerable populations, with provisions to favour access to information, participation and access to justice by these groups. Third, it also responds to the spirit of the United Nations’ (UN) Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights regarding companies’ specific obligations to respect human rights in the context of their activities.
Twenty-one states approved the final text in March 2018, in the Costa Rican town of Escazú, where the last of the nine meetings of the Negotiating Committee was held. For the Treaty to be adopted it has first to be ratified by 11 countries. By now, 6 have ratified it (Bolivia, Jamaica, Uruguay, Saint Kitts and Saint Vincent, Grenada and the Grenadines).
The UN official Treaty document: https://treaties.un.org/doc/Treaties/2018/03/20180312%2003-04%20PM/CTC-XXVII-18.pdf
A CEPAL, lighter version: (https://repositorio.cepal.org/bitstream/handle/11362/43583/1/S1800428_en.pdf
For further information see https://www.civicus.org/index.php/es/component/tags/tag/escazu-agreement and Mary Robinson at COP https://www.theelders.org/news/escazu-agreement-places-human-rights-heart-tackling-climate-crisis