To Eskimos, warming is a rights issue

To Eskimos, warming is a rights issue: "To Eskimos, warming is a rights issue
By Andrew C. Revkin The New York Times Thursday, December 16, 2004
The Eskimos, or Inuit, about 155,000 seal-hunting peoples scattered around the Arctic, plan to seek a ruling from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights that the United States, by contributing substantially to global warming, is threatening their existence.
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The Inuit plan is part of a broader shift in the debate over human-caused climate change evident among participants in the 10th round of international talks taking place in Buenos Aires.
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The talks are aimed at averting dangerous human interference with the climate system.
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Inuit leaders were announcing the effort at the climate meeting on Wednesday.
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Representatives of poor countries and communities - from the Arctic fringes to the atolls of the tropics to the flanks of the Himalayas - have said that they are imperiled by rising temperatures and seas through no fault of their own.
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They are casting the issue as no longer simply an environmental problem but as an assault on their basic human rights.
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The commission, an investigative arm of the Organization of American States, has no enforcement powers. But a declaration that the United States has violated the Inuit's rights could create the foundation for an eventual lawsuit, either against the United States in an international court or against American companies in a U.S. court, said a number of legal experts, including some aligned with industry.
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Such a petition could have decent prospects now that industrial countries, including the United States, have concluded in recent reports and studies that warming linked to heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe emissions is contributing to big environmental changes in the Arc"