World Parliament on Climate Change proposed

THE HON. DUNCAN KERR SC MP
FEDERAL MEMBER FOR DENISON
MEDIA RELEASE
16 July 2010
World Parliament on Climate Change proposed
At a conference in Canberra organized by the Australian National
University, experts have suggested the establishment of a world
parliament on global climate policy. The new body, initially composed
of around 550 delegates from national parliaments, could be set up as
a consultative body to the Conference of State Parties of the United
Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, UNFCCC.
“Climate change is one of the most important issues of this century
and an effective global response is urgent. We are convinced that a
global parliamentary assembly could help to reinvigorate the
negotiation process,” said Duncan Kerr, Australian Member of
Parliament and one of the proposal’s three co-authors.
The paper presented in Canberra argues that a parliamentary assembly
could help to improve the “significantly flawed” decision-making
process of the UNFCCC. According to Duncan Kerr and his co-authors,
the Argentinian Member of Parliament Fernando Iglesias and Andreas
Bummel , chairman of the Committee for a Democratic U.N. in Germany,
an agreement approved by a global parliamentary assembly “would have
unprecedented legitimacy.” They state that “this legitimacy would
exert moral pressure to join any post-Kyoto protocol and to secure
compliance.”
Mr. Kerr explained in Canberra that one of the parliament’s purposes
would be to act as a formal platform to facilitate and organize public
deliberation and to gather input from experts, civil society and from
the grass-roots level. “By contrast to top diplomats who represent
governments and report back to them, delegates of a parliamentary
assembly would be ultimately accountable to their constituents. Their
task would be to establish links to relevant groups and civil-society
organizations on the spot and to interact with them,” said Mr. Kerr.
The chairman of the European Parliament’s Committee on Environment,
Public Health and Food Safety, Jo Leinen from Germany, welcomed the
proposal. “A global parliamentary assembly would represent the common
interest of humanity in finding an effective response to climate
change. This perspective is urgently necessary to counterweight the
bargaining of national governments,” said Mr. Leinen. “Just as the
European Parliament originally started off as a consultative assembly
of the European Community on Coal and Steel in the 1950ies, a world
parliament may start as an advisory body on climate policy,” Mr.
Leinen added.
Duncan Kerr