Advocates & Solicitors
Monday, 1 August 2022
Riding on the recent resolution by the UN General Assembly, we came up with a campaign for MPs to pledge to recognise environmental rights in future legislations
On 28th July 2022, four days before an event in Parliament between civil society organisations and MPs to discuss climate action, it was reported that the United Nations General Assembly had made a historic declaration recognising the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment as a universal human right.
Instead of just attending at Parliament House on 1st August 2022 to discuss climate action with MPs, we thought perhaps we could also get MPs to sign a pledge to recognise the fundamental right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment in all future legislations, including any amendment to the Federal Constitution.
We quickly explored the idea with the ASEAN Parliamentarians for Human Rights (APHR) who were organising the event. Since this aligns well with their human rights advocacy work, they very graciously agreed to accommodate the campaign!
And we were off to the races to hammer out an MP's Pledge campaign within 4 days! Read more about it (including getting constitutional law expert Prof. Datuk Dr. Shad Saleem Faruqi onboard) in our blog post here.