Thomas A. Kerns – författare

For the first time in history, an international human-rights court has weighed the evidence that fracking and climate change systematically violate human rights. Bearing Witness presents the searing eyewitness testimony and ground-breaking legal arguments that persuaded the court that fracking and resulting climate warming breach both substantive and procedural rights guaranteed by international law, that governments are complicit in these rights-violations, and that the practice of fracking should be banned.

This book focuses on Youth Climate Courts, a bold new tool that young people in their teens and twenties can use to compel their local city or county government to live up to its human rights obligations, formally acknowledge the climate crisis, and take major steps to address it. Tom Kerns shows how youth climate leaders can form their own local Youth Climate Court, with youth judges, youth prosecuting attorneys, and youth jury members, and put their local city or county government on trial for not meeting its human rights obligations. Kerns describes how a Youth Climate Court works, how to start one, what human rights are, what they require of local governments, and what governmental changes a Youth Climate Court can realistically hope to accomplish. The book offers young activists a brand new, user-friendly, cost-free, barrier-free, powerful tool for forcing local governments to come to terms with their obligation to protect the rights of their citizens with respect to the climate crisis. This book offers a unique new tool to young climate activists hungry for genuinely effective ways to directly move governments to aggressively address the climate crisis.