The Nationalist Party is proposing to recognise the right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment in our constitution. Pointless? Hypocritical? No sense of priorities? Or a good thing?
It depends on the larger story you tell yourself. Does it feature bolting horses, singing sirens or burning boats?
Some initial online reactions dismissed the proposal as pointless. The stable door was being closed after the horse bolted. Protect the environment? What environment?
It’s an understandable reaction but it exaggerates. No day passes without a report about cynical environmental destruction. But it’s a disaster that we have on our hands, not an extinction.
The PN’s proposal specifies protecting air, land and water; it speaks of democratising environmental governance. If those aren’t just pious wishes (more below) but instead are a programme of action and legal accountability, the disaster will be stopped.
And you will have the legal framework within which to reverse some of the environmental damage. With political will, a democratic mandate and the right economic incentives, it’s possible.
Some of the critics were more measured. The environment may be worth preserving but there are more urgent priorities, like affordable housing.
But these are not rival priorities. Affordable housing depends, in part, on environmental spatial planning. The affordability of housing is related to, among other things, pollution of air, water, noise and smells. These are all features that a fundamental right to a healthy environment would help secure.
But would it be more than just words on paper? Some of the online critics dismissed the proposal as hypocritical given the Nationalist governments’ record on the environment. Even if you think that record is much better than this lot’s, there’s a reasonable question underlying the criticism.
Our constitution is full of beautiful resolutions that are respected only in the breach. Our political parties campaign by spouting environmentalist poetry and then govern in proġetti prose. Why should this law make us trust any government?
I suspect it’s in recognition of this widespread distrust that the PN is proposing the law. It’s proposing to bind our prime ministers. No matter how sweet the siren songs of the Malta Developers Association, our PMs will be bound to the mast of the constitution while their ministers, oarsmen of the ship of state, have their ears plugged.
Bernard Grech, having told us he once passed himself off as Greek, now wants us to believe he can be Ulysses. Hold that thought.
For the proposal to work, it can’t just be PN-proof. It needs to be Labour-proof, too. Robert Abela – a wannabe Onassis, not Ulysses – won’t even tell us if he owns the boat he holidays on, let alone if he’d be ready to bind himself on it.
Labour’s record on rights is, at best, patchy. When it comes to rights relevant to the environment, it’s bad. The ecological destruction is only part of it.
The right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment depends on a range of other rights – among them, the right to information (to see what the internal studies really show and what contracts really say) and access to justice.
We have those rights on paper but securing them has been something else. Abela’s government claims to have protected the media from extortionate lawsuits (SLAPP); in practice, it forces media houses to engage in expensive, time-consuming court cases, at risk of financial ruin, to insist on getting information it is owed under the Freedom of Information Act.
Our political parties campaign by spouting environmentalist poetry and then govern in proġetti prose- Ranier Fsadni
Citizens have the right to ask a court to order a magisterial inquiry. But when Repubblika formally requested one into the hospitals deal, government ministers repeatedly resisted it in court. It takes stamina, doggedness and expense (and a principled judiciary) to get an inquiry going.
Those rights proved to be worth something. The Shift News has won a dozen cases. The hospitals deal inquiry is moving along and its muscle is causing Joseph Muscat to squeal.
But getting action based on those rights was an exhausting struggle. Organisations needed to grit their teeth, sacrifice time and sleep, and lawyer up.
So, if the PN allows this proposal to be framed by the tale of Ulysses and the Sirens, this proposal will have limited persuasive appeal. Experience says it’s nowhere near enough. The PN needs to place this proposal in a different story: a battle for environmental justice where, to make sure there’s no going back, the boats are burned on the seashore.
The first step would be the constitutional proposition, coupled with the argument that without a healthy sustainable environment, other human rights become less real.
Second, there should come the energy to work on grassroots issues. Human rights we already recognise – like the rights to privacy and family life, to health and dignity, to information – are already being violated.
The party and its MPs should offer concrete organisational help in individual cases.
Third, the administrative implications for spatial planning need to be spelled out. It can’t just be woolly platitudes. Nothing shows you’re burning your boats better than to articulate positions that take a robust independent line from the developers’ lobby.
None of these will ultimately secure environmental rights from a cynical government. What it would take is a pro bono legal service – the environmental analogue of the American Civil Liberties Union in the US – to take individual cases to court.
What environmental NGOs do in the area of public persuasion, a legal NGO (say, a Malta Environmental Rights Union) would do in the courts to combat a cynical government’s attempt to exhaust, out-lawyer and outspend the people whose rights it tramples over.
Such an NGO would be greatly helped if a fundamental right to the environment were constitutionalised. The Freedom of Information Act, and a citizen’s right to request a magisterial inquiry, have been treated as meaningless by the government but, ultimately, they were important to hold it accountable.
The PN’s proposal won’t burn the boats. But it does light the torches.