A legal duty of care for the Earth
Fifteen years ago Polly Higgins abandoned her career as a barrister to campaign for an international crime of ecocide. Sadly she died of cancer on Easter Sunday at the early age of 50.
Her aim in making ecocide an international crime was to enable people like company chief executives and government ministers to be prosecuted at the International Criminal Court (ICC) at The Hague for causing or contributing to large-scale ecosystem destruction.
In her research on the subject she discovered that the Rome Statute, which set up the ICC, had originally included the crime of ecocide, but that it had been dropped at the final drafting stage. She set out to see that this “missing” crime was reinstated alongside genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity and crimes of aggression, and submitted a proposal to the UN Law Commission in 2010 that defined ecocide as “extensive loss, damage to or destruction of ecosystems of a given territory, such that peaceful enjoyment by the inhabitants has been or will be severely diminished”.
Polly’s first book, Eradicating Ecocide: Laws and Governance to Prevent the Destruction of Our Planet (2010), won the 2010-11 People’s Book Prize and set out her full proposal, while her second book, Earth Is Our Business (2012), included a draft Ecocide Act and indictments that had been used in a mock trial in the UK Supreme Court with Michael Mansfield QC prosecuting. Read the full obituary in the Guardian.
Overcoming Poverty
In Progress and Poverty Henry George sought the ‘cause of industrial depressions and the increase of want with the increase of wealth’ and offered a ‘remedy’ which remains as relevant to the problems of poverty and inequality we face today, as when he first wrote, but it also opens a new way of dealing with environmental pollution.
read moreA History of Land Value Taxation in Pittsburgh
This essay on Pittsburgh by Ian Hopton follows the theme of an earlier essay on New Zealand enquiring into the reasons why clearly successful systems of Land Value Taxation were nevertheless abandoned.
read moreTony Blair initiative to solve housing crisis
The Observer (3rd Dec) revealed a new initiative to tackle the housing crisis from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. Blair is proposing that council tax and business rates, which are currently based on the value of the site and any building or improvement on it, be replaced by a tax which relates solely to the value of the land under the buildings, arguing that it is a “fairer and more rational system of property taxation”.
read moreWould Henry George’s ‘Remedy’ help us combat today’s global crises?
In Progress and Poverty Henry George sought the ‘cause of industrial depressions and the increase of want with the increase of wealth’ and offered a ‘remedy’ which remains as relevant to the problems of poverty and inequality we face today, as when he first wrote.
read more
LATEST BOOK
How Our Economy Really Works
– Why are so many trapped in poverty, when others are grossly well-off?
– Why are house prices continuously rising faster than inflation?
– Why do people so often find themselves in jobs that give them little sense of fulfilment?
– Why is a multi-national coffee shop franchise not actually making its money from coffee?
These questions have confronted the UK economy for decades without resolution by governments of the right or left. It is the failure of economics, the author argues.
ISBN 9780856835292 | Price: £9.95