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By:

Hridbina Chatterjee

29 August 2024 at 3:43:30 pm

Driving Climate Accountability

As political inertia stalls environmental action, courts and green tribunals across the Global South are turning legal principles into enforceable climate accountability. Protecting ecologically sensitive areas is increasingly testing the balance between economic development and environmental obligations. As governments struggle to translate environmental commitments into action, judicial institutions across the Global South are emerging as powerful enforcers of ecological accountability. The...

Driving Climate Accountability

As political inertia stalls environmental action, courts and green tribunals across the Global South are turning legal principles into enforceable climate accountability. Protecting ecologically sensitive areas is increasingly testing the balance between economic development and environmental obligations. As governments struggle to translate environmental commitments into action, judicial institutions across the Global South are emerging as powerful enforcers of ecological accountability. The recent two-day international summit on ‘The Future of Environment and Climate Dynamics’ inaugurated by Prime Minister Narendra Modi and hosted by the National Green Tribunal in New Delhi, brought together jurists from 17 nations to explore this expanding role of the judiciary in climate governance. The Delhi summit underscored that courts and specialized tribunals are no longer mere arbiters of dispute but have become active, institutional drivers of climate accountability, translating abstract ecological commitments into enforceable, day-to-day legal remedies. Judicial Environmentalism This phenomenon of judicial environmentalism is understood as a structural response to a longstanding deficiency in execution. Although developing nations are generally at the forefront of establishing ambitious statutory goals, from renewable energy development to forest preservation, the bureaucratic apparatus that is responsible for enforcing these goals has usually faltered in the face of political compromises and enforcement difficulties. Several specialized institutions, like the National Green Tribunal in India, were specifically established to fill this gap. By combining judicial expertise with technical assessment, tribunals have created a forum where regulatory inertia can be challenged directly by citizens, local communities, and non-governmental entities. The gathering of jurists from 17 developing and emerging nations indicates that this is not an isolated experiment, but a developing trend in the Global South, where the judiciary is taking the initiative for transforming legislative goals into tangible ecological protection. Fundamental principles like the public trust doctrine, intergenerational equity, and the polluter pays principle are at the base of this judicial transformation. In the past, these ideas were merely present in the introductory part of legislative texts or in international declarations. However, in recent times, courts began to convert abstract legal concepts into practical solutions. The use of the public trust doctrine helps courts remove full power from governments regarding the reclassification of sensitive areas like wetlands and forests for industrial purposes. The evolution of the principle of intergenerational equity means that courts gain the right to examine whether certain industrial activities will have negative consequences for future generations. Moreover, this operational jurisprudence has drastically changed the mechanisms of climate finance and corporate accountability from its original form. In various jurisdictions across the Global South, specialized environmental courts have ceased conducting the standard practice of issuing cease-and-desist orders. Instead, these courts have begun creating compensation schemes whereby polluters have to pay for damage done to the environment for a specified amount, and these funds are devoted to local ecosystem restoration projects. By linking monetary liability, which has to be paid by polluters, to ecological restoration, courts make sure that polluters bear financial responsibility that prevents them from causing damaging actions. This judicial practice has made sovereign states and state agencies accountable for their failure to enforce the law, creating an obligation to control different processes in an open manner and in a constant manner. A Regional Engine The collaborative dynamics highlighted during the summit point toward the creation of a cross-border judicial framework across the Global South. Problems arising from the deterioration of trans-border river basins, air pollution, and exposure to vulnerable coastal areas disregard borders. At the same time, negotiations related to functioning in these shared spaces are full of political and diplomatic problems. However, judicial systems, similar in terms of principles of law and constitution, provide an unconventionally effective way of aligning institutions. Hence, judges share their protocols, processes, and interpretations of laws and thereby lay the foundations of a distinctive jurisprudence aimed at the conditions of the Global South. This framework is particularly significant in balancing rapid economic development with environmental conservation. According to the proceedings, countries of the Global South face the challenge of addressing poverty and the disproportionately negative effects of climate change, which is largely attributed to historical industrialization in other places. By incorporating the principle of the right to a clean environment as part of their constitutional and human rights, judicial institutions aim to ensure that economic growth does not come at the cost of ecology and those suffering in society. The involvement of international judges in the proceedings demonstrates the growing recognition of judicial enforcement as an important tool of justice and accountability, which should be applied to both national governments and international obligations. Ultimately, the proceedings hosted by the National Green Tribunal demonstrate that judicial environmentalism has evolved from a reactive mechanism into a proactive, institutionalized engine of climate governance. As executive machinery continues to navigate competing electoral priorities and political constraints, the responsibility of maintaining the delicate balance between human development and planetary preservation increasingly rests upon the strength of the courtroom. By enforcing strict administrative accountability, defining clear technical parameters for regulatory compliance, and asserting the primacy of ecological constitutionalism, specialized tribunals across the Global South are establishing a transformative paradigm where judicial oversight bridges institutional gaps, ensures long-term regulatory integrity, and guarantees that the rule of law serves as the ultimate safeguard for present and future generations. (The writer is a columnist and policy researcher with a focus on South Asian geopolitics, India’s foreign policy, and the Indo-Pacific. Views personal.)

Why Are Thousands of Jews Leaving Israel?

AP
Dec 22, 2024
6 min read

Updated: Dec 23, 2024

Jews

Leaving Israel is easier, Shira Z. Carmel thinks, by saying it's just for now. But she knows better.


For the Israeli-born singer and an increasing number of relatively well-off Israelis, the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack shattered any sense of safety and along with it, Israel's founding promise: to be the world's safe haven for Jews. That day, thousands of Hamas militants blew past the country's border defences, killed 1,200 people and dragged 250 more into Gaza in a siege that caught the Israeli army by surprise and stunned a nation that prides itself on military prowess. This time, during what became known as Israel's 9/11, the army didn't come for hours.


Ten days later, a pregnant Carmel, her husband and their toddler boarded a flight to Australia, which was looking for people in her husband's profession. And they spun the explanation to friends and family as something other than permanent — “relocation" is the easier-to-swallow term — acutely aware of the familial strain and the shame that have shadowed Israelis who leave for good.


“We told them we're going to get out of the line of fire for a while,” Carmel said more than a year later from her family's new home in Melbourne. “It wasn't a hard decision. But it was very hard to talk to them about it. It was even hard to admit it to ourselves."


Thousands of Israelis have left the country since October 7, 2023, according to government statistics and immigration tallies released by destination countries such as Canada and Germany. There's concern about whether it will drive a “brain drain” in sectors like medicine and tech. Migration experts say it's possible people leaving Israel will surpass the number of immigrants to Israel in 2024, according to Sergio DellaPergola, a statistician and professor emeritus of Hebrew University in Jerusalem.


“In my view, this year people entering will be smaller than the total of the exit," he said. “And this is quite unique in the existence of the State of Israel.”


Early information points to a surge of Israelis leaving

The October 7 effect on Israeli emigration is enough for prominent Israelis to acknowledge the phenomenon publicly — and warn of rising antisemitism elsewhere.


“There is one thing that worries me in particular: talks about leaving the country. This must not happen,” former premier Naftali Bennett, a staunch critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, tweeted in June after a conversation with friends who were leaving. Israel, he wrote, needs to retain the talent. “Who wants to return to the days of the wandering Jew, without real freedom, without a state, subject to every anti-Semitic whim?”


Thousands of Israelis have opted to pay the financial, emotional and social costs of moving out since the Oct. 7 attack, according to government statistics and families who spoke to The Associated Press in recent months after emigrating to Canada, Spain and Australia. Israel's overall population continues to grow toward 10 million people.


But it's possible that 2024 ends with more Israelis leaving the country than coming in. That's even as Israel and Hezbollah reached a fragile ceasefire along the border with Lebanon and Israel and Hamas inch toward a pause in Gaza.


Israel's Central Bureau of Statistics estimated in September that 40,600 Israelis departed long-term over the first seven months of 2024, a 59 per cent increase over the same period a year earlier, when 25,500 people left. Monthly, 2,200 more people departed this year than in 2023, CBS reported.


The Israeli Ministry of Immigration and Absorption, which does not deal with people leaving, said more than 33,000 people have moved to Israel since the start of the war, about on par with previous years. The interior minister refused to comment for this story.


The numbers are equally dramatic in destination countries. More than 18,000 Israelis applied for German citizenship in 2024, more than double the same period in 2023 and three times that of the year before, the Interior Ministry reported in September.


Canada, which has a three-year work visa program for Israelis and Palestinians fleeing the war, received 5,759 applications for work permits from Israeli citizens between January and October this year, the government told The Associated Press. In 2023, that number was 1,616 applications, and a year earlier the tally was 1,176 applications, according to Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship Canada.


They want to wake up in the morning and enjoy life

Other clues, too, point to a notable departure of Israelis since the October 7 attacks. Gil Fire, deputy director of Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, said that some of its star specialists with fellowship postings of a few years in other countries began to waver about returning.


“Before the war, they always came back and it was not really considered an option to stay. And during the war we started to see a change,” he said. “They said to us, We will stay another year, maybe two years, maybe more.'”


Fire says it's “an issue of concern” enough for him to plan in-person visits with these doctors in the coming months to try to draw them back to Israel.


Michal Harel, who moved with her husband to Toronto in 2019, said that almost immediately after the attacks the phone began ringing — with other Israelis seeking advice about moving to Canada. On Nov. 23, 2023, the couple set up a website to help Israelis navigate moving, which can cost at least 100,000 Israeli shekels, or about $28,000, Harel and other Israeli relocation experts said.


Not everyone in Israel can just pack up and move overseas. Many of those who have made the move have foreign passports, jobs at multinational corporations or can work remotely. People in Gaza have even less choice. The vast majority of Gaza's 2.3 million people have been displaced by relentless Israeli bombing since Oct. 7, 2023, yet no one has been able to leave the enclave since May. Before then, at least 100,000 Palestinians are believed to have left Gaza.


Health officials in Gaza say Israeli bombing has killed more than 45,000 people.


Speaking by phone last month, Harel reported that the site has received views from 100,000 unique visitors and 5,000 direct contacts in 2024 alone.

“It's people who want to move quickly with families, to wake up in the morning and enjoy life,” she said. “Right now (in Israel), it's trauma, trauma, trauma.”


“Some of them,” Harel added, "they want to keep everything a secret.”


Leaving Zion, a threat to Israel and a shame?

Aliya — the Hebrew term for used for immigration, literally the “ascent” of Jews into Israel — has always been part of the country's plan. But “yerida” — the term used for leaving the country, literally the “descent” of Jews from Israel to the diaspora, emphatically has not.


For Israel's first decades of independence, the government strongly discouraged departing Israelis, who were seen in some cases as cowardly and even treasonous. A sacred trust and a social contract took root in Israeli society. The terms go — or went — like this: Israeli citizens would serve in the military and pay high taxes. In exchange, the army would keep them safe. Meanwhile, it's every Jew's obligation to stay, work and fight for Israel's survival.


“Emigration was a threat, especially in the early years (when) there were problems of nation-building. In later decades, Israel became more established and more self-confident,” said Ori Yehudai, a professor of Israel studies at Ohio State University and the author of “Leaving Zion,” a history of Israeli emigration. The sense of shame is more of a social dynamic now, he said, but “people still feel they have to justify their decision to move.”


Shira Carmel says she has no doubt about her decision. She'd long objected to Netanyahu's government's efforts to overhaul the legal system, and was one of the first women to don the blood-red "Handmaid's Tale" robes that became a fixture of the anti-government protests of 2023. She was terrified as a new mom, and a pregnant one, during the Hamas attack, and appalled at having to tell her toddler that they were gathering in the bomb shelter for “hugging parties" with the neighbors. This was not the life she wanted.


Meanwhile, Australia beckoned. Carmel's brother had lived there for two decades. The couple had the equivalent of a green card due to Carmel's husband's profession. In the days after the attack, Carmel's brother alerted her to the possibility of a flight out of Israel for free, if on very short notice, which she confirmed with the Australian embassy in Israel. Basic logic, she says, pointed toward moving.


And yet.


Carmel recalls the frenzied hours before the flight out in which she said to her husband in the privacy of their bedroom: “My God, are we really doing this?”

They decided not to decide, opting instead for: “We're just getting on a plane for now, being grateful.” They packed lightly.


On the ground half a world away, weeks became months. And they decided: “I'm not going to go back to try to give birth in the war.” In December, they told their families back in Israel that they were staying “for now.”

“We don't define it as forever,'" Carmel said Tuesday. “But we are for sure staying for the foreseeable future.”

-AP

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