Youth Climate Courts

Tom Kerns is Director of Environment and Human Rights Advisory and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at North Seattle College, USA. His work brings human rights norms to bear on environmental issues, especially on the climate crisis. In 2015 he served on the drafting group for the international "Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change", and from 2014 until 2018 he co-organized the 2018 Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal Session on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change. He is co-editor, with Kathleen Dean Moore, of Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change (2021), a book based on the testimony and findings in that Tribunal.

“This little book is an empowering guide. It sets out a clear way for young people (and others) to hold governments and corporations to account for failures to take the climate crisis seriously. This powerful little book breaks new ground, offering a cost-free, barrier-free tool for activism. I highly recommend it! Go, set up a youth climate court, call power to account using this unique way of taking action. Do it everywhere.”Anna Grear, Founder and first Director of the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment, and Professor of Law at Cardiff University, UK"Youth Climate Courts: How You Can Host a Human Rights Trial for People and Planet is a small but powerful guide for young people to use as one way to encourage their local city or regional governments to account for their human rights obligations, formally acknowledge the climate crisis and its impacts on a range of human rights and take steps to address it. This is the first practical guidebook to support and inspire inter>generational climate action written especially for young people."Judith Preston, Journal of Energy & Natural Resources Law

• 0. Dear Reader 1. Introduction 2. How Does a Youth Climate Court Work? 3. What Are Human Rights? 4. Which Specific Human Rights? 5. CODA: Youth Interventions for an Addicted World