NEWSBYGIOVANNI MEJIA

Doug Struck’s recent Christian Science Monitor article on carbon offsets provides yet another illustration of the limited potential of market-based proposals for addressing climate change. Stop me if you’ve heard this one before, but apparently a complex, unregulated market is ripe for fraud, deceit, and incompetence. While it’s important to note that there are several legitimate carbon offset programs, the field is predictably littered with unsavory financial speculators posing as environmentalists.

Hopefully we’ve learned by now that market-based solutions to society’s problems offer, at best, an incomplete approach. The comprehensive remediation of climate change will also require innovative mechanisms that directly address its human implications. In this vein, the rights of future generations provide an intriguing approach for the protection of human rights in an environmental context.

Since the 1970s, intergenerational rights have been recognized by several international agreements, including the Stockholm Declaration, the Rio Declaration, and the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The rights of future generations are further protected by multiple national constitutions. In the United States, there are overtures to intergenerational justice in both state and federal law. But how does a society actually protect the rights of future generations?

For much of its history, Lago Agrio, in the northeastern Ecuadorean province of Sucumbíos, was a patch of pristine Amazonian rainforest inhabited primarily by local indigenous peoples. Then Texaco arrived in the 1960s. It began full-scale oil producing operations shortly thereafter, continuing until the early 1990s. During this time, 1,700 square miles of Amazonian rain forest were transformed into an environmental disaster marred by toxic oil-drilling byproducts and crude oil that were improperly contained and/or disposed of.

Shortly after Texaco pulled out, a long legal battle began between the oil company (carried on by Chevron after a 2001 merger) and the local settlers and indigenous peoples, “Los Afectados.” Since then, the case has drawn international attention from human rights activists, similarly affected communities, multinational corporations, government officials and various media outlets. Troublingly, the problem has also come under the guise of the newest legal gimmick available to many multinational corporations attempting to protect their bottom line in the face of larger human rights concerns — international arbitration.

Litigation over the ecological disaster that is Lago Agrio has produced a decades-long narrative that rivals Finnegans Wake in complexity. Since 1993, the case has meandered through a change in venue, an ill-fated oil company-government agreement, legal delay-tactics, hundreds of thousands of pages in court filings, and allegations of violent intimidation, fraud, and corruption.

Well that was weird. Tiger Woods is back on the golf course where he’s two shots off the lead after the first day of the Masters. He’s also back on our TV screens where he and Nike have deftly combined the art of corporate shilling and the sullen mea culpa. Who knew they go together so well? If only Bob McDonnell were sponsored by Nike.

Tiger’s late father provides the soundtrack for the thirty second spot, but it’s pretty clear that his monologue is supposed to refer to recent events in Tiger’s life. And while celebrity infidelity makes for juicy gossip, a far more interesting question is what is Tiger thinking building a golf course in Dubai? How does it make him feel? Has he learned anything?

Political writer Johan Hari has described Dubai as a city built on “credit and ecocide, suppression and slavery.” The city is essentially a tourist oasis in the desert — minus the water. In order to allure foreigners with green lawns and indoor ski slopes, the city must desalinate water from the ocean in a process that is both costly (more expensive than producing gasoline) and harmful to the environment (Dubai boasts one of the largest per capita carbon footprints in the world). Just as troubling, a 2006 Human Rights Watch report revealed that the city’s luxurious towers, resorts and real estate developments have been built by de facto slave laborers lured from abroad.

The Masters is teeing off today at Augusta National in Georgia. The tournament is amongst the most watched and prestigious golf events in the world. Tiger Woods' return to golf is the big story this year, and maybe you’ve heard a thing or two about it. But amidst all the hand-wringing over Woods' epic fall from grace, it’s easy to lose sight of the golf world’s much more embarrassing knack for social ambivalence in changing times.

Although the reality is a bit more complex, golf has long been associated with rich white males and exclusive country clubs. Indeed, Venezuelan quote-machine President Hugo Chávez wasn’t completely out of bounds when he denounced golf as a “bourgeois sport” this past August. And although it was approved last year as an Olympic event for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Games, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) nonetheless expressed concerns over golf’s social divide, its limited accessibility and the gender discrimination policies of several top clubs.

Augusta National is one of these clubs. In 2003, at the peak of the controversy over its exclusively male membership, club chairman Hootie Johnson went so far as to forgo corporate sponsorship to protect its membership policies. To date, the club has yet to admit a woman.

The most significant tablet-related event since Mount Horeb, Steve Job’s latest brainchild will be handed down to the masses this Saturday. Savvy as you are, you probably had the foresight to pre-order online (the better to read the Change.org Human Rights Blog, after all). But for those poor souls planning to make an early morning pilgrimage to an Apple Store or Best Buy, it might be worth asking yourself how badly you really need yet another gadget in your life.

The iPad is only the latest must-have gizmo to enter the voracious consumer electronics market. Frequent advancements in technology have significantly cut down the lifespan of these devices over the past two decades. Just think, your new purchase will look silly when the second generation iPad comes out a couple weeks later– and at a lower price.

Although up-to-date electronic devices can offer several advantages over their older counterparts, this rapid proliferation of electronic goods poses several problems. The consistent release of new product lines requires copious materials and resource-intensive distribution lines. Many of the substances in these products, such as lead, arsenic and cadmium, are toxic. Workers and the environment are subject to exposure risks throughout the extraction, refining, and manufacturing processes.

As a foreboding backdrop to debates over the forcible administration of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) and other psychiatric treatments, the larger issue of involuntary commitment has long danced an uneasy waltz between human rights and medicine.

In its most cynical iterations, involuntary commitment has been used as a tool of political repression. Other instances have seen it used as a rubber-stamped alternative to fair trials and procedural safeguards against physical detention. Archaic understandings of mental illness and the decrepit legacy of mental institutions only add to the skepticism, forever haunting the well-intentioned defenses of coerced treatment.

In the United States, the past forty years have demonstrated significant shifts over the proper boundaries of involuntary commitment. The 1972 Lessard v. Schmidt decision marked a watershed in involuntary commitment standards. It ushered in a shift from vague commitment statutes grounded on a medical model to a dangerousness rubric geared around public safety. The decision also determined that constitutional rights required that commitment proceedings provide procedural protections mirroring many of those found in criminal matters. Although specifics vary amongst jurisdictions, the dangerousness framework announced by a Milwaukee federal district court subsequently spread to other U.S courts and legislatures.

Once every four years the World Cup provides a global forum to bring the world together and celebrate the highest triumphs of collective will and human ambition. Those precious few weeks serve as a spectacle that can reach across borders, creeds, and ideologies. Luckily for all of us, whether attending or watching from our cozy homes, we won’t have to deal with the dreary image of poor people! (Heavy sarcasm intended.)

The U.N. Special Rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, Raquel Rolnik, recently laid into FIFA, football’s global governing body, for its silence on South African housing rights violations. Her report came in response to various allegations of forced relocations in anticipation of the 2010 World Cup. One such instance was the removal of 20,000 denizens from a Cape Town settlement. For the World Cup, a tournament that hinges on the talents of poor and working class youths from around the globe, the irony of forcibly displacing impoverished communities from their homes to facilitate wealthy tourists is rich.

For many, electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) –- more colloquially, “shock therapy” –- conjures up negative images of science-fiction quackery. But ECT is currently more common than you might think, including its use on patients who can’t or won’t provide consent.

The Irish parliament and the United States’ Food and Drug Administration (FDA) are both in the process of reevaluating existing regulations regarding ECT. They join other countries that have in recent years taken a hard look at the practice. Nonetheless, standards for the administration of involuntary ECT vary significantly. Setting aside all of the cultural baggage, ECT posits several difficult questions regarding human rights and psychiatry.

Many psychiatrists consider ECT a safe, effective treatment for serious mental illness, particularly depression. They consider it even more appropriate where other treatment methods have failed (a recent Newsweek cover story highlighted growing doubts over the effectiveness of existing antidepressant medication). Proponents of ECT also argue that its risks ought to be measured against the harsh side-effects of many drugs.

But even amongst those mental health professionals that consider ECT a legitimate treatment (and there are some that don’t), there is much uncertainty. It’s not clear how ECT actually works and there is controversy over the procedure’s long-term side-effects.

Copenhagen came and went this past December without the development of a legally binding climate change agreement. Curiously, various political figures are already calling for such an agreement at the next round of UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations later this year in Mexico.

If only someone had told them about the conference at Copenhagen. As negotiations on the preeminent transnational environmental problem of our time plod ahead, it is evident that the process has lacked the urgency befitting the human rights implications of climate change.

Climate change has a dramatic impact on agriculture, public health, coastal communities, and local ecosystems. The rights to life, water, health, sustenance and culture of many individuals and communities are already in danger. Moreover, climate change will almost certainly disproportionately burden those who are often socially and politically disadvantaged such as the poor, children, women, disabled persons and indigenous communities.

Yes, the connection between the environment and human rights is not a novel idea.

International Women’s Day is a global occasion to celebrate women’s past achievements and campaign against continuing inequalities, and is an official holiday recognized in various countries throughout Africa, Asia, and Europe. Wherever you are, chances are there’s an event happening somewhere nearby (if you’re in the United States, you can also partake in Women’s History Month events today and throughout the rest of the month). Participate in a rally, hear leaders and activists speak, or even catch a flick or two.

At the very least, give your mother a call, she’ll appreciate it.

Since the inception of International Women’s Day in 1911, several developments have improved the standing of women in the international arena. Various multilateral agreements have recognized the specific obligations incumbent on states and private actors to guarantee that women can freely exercise their rights. Some of these agreements, such as the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), ahem, acknowledge many of the larger, systemic gender inequities. Other instruments, like the human trafficking protocol to the Convention against Transnational Organized Crime attempt to develop legal regimes to tackle more specific violations of women’s rights.

Just as important as the development of formal international norms, if not more so, women have increasingly ascended into decision-making roles in society. In various communities throughout the globe women have not only successfully demanded suffrage and other participatory rights, but they have also risen to the highest ranks of government, business, academia and civil society.