Hearing to Probe Climate Change and Inuit Rights

[Doondoo]

The Inuit of Arctic Canada and Alaska are bearing the brunt of global warming and their way of life is in peril, an international human rights body will be told next month.

Inuit activists hope a hearing on Arctic climate change by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights will lead to reduced emissions and will help to protect the culture of the northern native people.

"In the Arctic, things are happening first and fastest and it's a way of life that's being jeopardized here," said Canadian Inuit activist Sheila Watt-Cloutier, who submitted a petition for a hearing on how climate change infringes on Inuit human rights to the commission in 2005 on behalf of Inuit in Canada and Alaska.

The commission, which is an arm of the Organization of American States, rejected Cloutier's request to rule on the rights violations caused specifically by U.S. emissions, deciding instead to hold a general hearing on March 1 to investigate the broad relationship between climate change and human rights. Officials at the Washington-based commission said it will be the body's first such hearing.

Climate change "very much connects to rights because no where else in the world do you see ice and snow representing life and mobility like it does for us," Watt-Cloutier, a Nobel Peace Prize nominee for her work on the issue, said from the northern Canadian territory of Nunavut.


http://www.enn.com/med.html?id=1416