Downloads
Tasks
- Research the issue of climate justice and Bangladesh. You will find a variety of resources on the Internet, e.g. in project materials from the church aid organisations „Bread for the World“ and „Misereor“, but also from the German Bundestag. Briefly summarise the effects of climate change in Bangladesh. Assess with (at least) one specific example the attempt to take account of man-made climate change.
- Watch the video M9a (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sH-oYW_2kOk ) of human rights lawyer Yi Yi Prue, speaking at a ‘Fridays for Future’ demonstration in Berlin, Germany, in 2021.
- After reading the text about the climate lawsuit before the German Federal Constitutional Court here below:
a) Describe your first impression after reading with one sentence.
b) Visualise Yi Yi Prue’s journey from experiencing climate change in Bangladesh to the
decision of the to the judgement of the Constitutional Court in Germany.
c) Discuss the consequences of the Constitutional Court’s judgement for living in the
global north.
„My name is Yi Yi Prue, I am a lawyer and I was born in a city in the south-east of Bangladesh. The area I come from is called Chittagong Hill Tracts. It is a hilly area near the border between Bangladesh and Myanmar. There are many indigenous communities in Bangladesh and many of them are from the Chittagong Hill Tracts. I belong to the indigenous Marma community, an ethnic group of about 210,000 people who mainly live in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
Bangladesh often appears in the news, even in countries like Germany, with images of natural disasters such as floods and landslides. Growing up, I experienced these disasters first-hand and saw people lose their homes to landslides. These were the consequences of environmental degradation and climate change that were caused by others but directly affected my community. This shows how unjust the climate crisis is: those who are affected by climate change are not responsible for it. And those who are responsible are suffering and do not see the consequences as we do. That is climate injustice.
In 2017, a strong monsoon caused extreme landslides in my district and others. More than 100 people lost their lives. I visited the victims of this disaster and wrote a report about the landslide and its effects. With this report, I contacted organisations and lawyers in various countries. I received a reply from Dr Remo Klinger, a human rights lawyer from Germany. Together, we started working on a complaint to the Constitutional Court in September 2019 and received support from Deutsche Umwelthilfe, an organisation with a lot of experience with climate and environmental complaints. As a lawyer myself, I know how important laws are. They can be a powerful driving force for change, because law can mean justice. In our case, we were concerned with climate justice.
So I set out to collect stories from climate victims in Nepal and Bangladesh. They are all suffering from the different effects of the climate crisis. Some of them have lost their homes to landslides, cyclones and floods and are now living as climate refugees in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh. Others are living with a shortage of drinking water because rising sea levels are causing the soil and water to become saline. This is also having an impact on agriculture, with the result that many farmers can no longer make a living from their harvests. All these traumatic experiences naturally have an impact on the mental health of climate victims – it is a constant struggle to survive and find solutions to adapt to extreme challenges and changes.
With all these stories, we filed a lawsuit with the German Constitutional Court against the inadequate climate legislation of the German state. This was not easy to argue, because we were faced with a problem of attribution: how can we prove that the climate disasters in Bangladesh were caused by the inadequate actions of the German government? It was not easy to make this connection visible.
We argued that the German government’s climate laws, which do not comply with the 1.5-degree target, violate the fundamental rights of climate victims, including the right to life and physical integrity. In April 2021, we learnt that our complaint, along with three other ‚climate complaints‘, had been successful. This means that the Constitutional Court has ruled that Germany is neglecting human rights because it is not taking sufficient action against climate change. The decision was a powerful symbol not only for the German government, but also for other industrialised countries that are responsible for the majority of global emissions. Just as importantly, it showed that the victims of climate change can raise their voices to obtain justice.
But we are still a long way from climate justice. The constitutional complaint was an important step, but not the only one. It is very important to continue to make the stories of climate victims heard. Above all, already marginalised groups in society, for example women and indigenous communities, must be given a voice. I continue my work to bring their stories to countries like Germany, where important action against climate change needs to be taken. This is of course a challenge: it can be difficult to reach the people most affected because they often lack the infrastructure. In Germany, it’s also difficult for someone like me, who doesn’t speak German and doesn’t know the procedures, to organise and be heard. This means that we have to join forces and work together.
I have been fortunate to work with many inspiring people from Bangladesh, Germany and other countries, including very young people. I believe that we need to bring our skills and experiences together to make the voices of climate victims heard and demand climate justice.“ (Yi Yi Prue)
The agenda is intended to help enable all people worldwide to live in dignity. It aims to promote peace and to ensure that all people can live in freedom and in an intact environment.
The Agenda is aimed at all states in the global community. They are equally called upon to work towards the development goals formulated in it – there is no division into „donors“ and „recipients“ or into „first“, „second“ and „third world“ in the Agenda.
Quelle: Brot für die Welt, Global Lernen 2023-1, S.8. Online: https://www.brot-fuer-die-welt.de/fileadmin/mediapool/downloads/Bildungsmaterial/global-lernen/Global_lernen_Handabdruck/BfdW_GlobalLernen_Handabdruck.pdf