Making Responsibility the Ethical Core of the Twenty-first Century and the Foundation of a Third Pillar for the International Community: What Strategy Should We Implement after the Failure of Rio+20?

Pierre CALAME, 12 octobre 2012

Between the first international Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972 and the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992, awareness had been slowly growing about the fact that societies are all interdependent, and that humankind and the biosphere are interdependent too. Each society’s impact on the others was to be taken into account, and the overall impact of societies on the planet assumed. This implied that every actor, every society, every nation was accountable for its impact on others and on the biosphere.

What was at stake was the very survival of humankind. This was the idea underlying the “Earth Charter.” When the 1992 Earth Summit was in preparation, many different Earth Charter projects were developed, both by states and by civil society. They were to lead to a new international convention, a third pillar for the international community alongside the Charter of the United Nations and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, because neither of the two founding texts adopted in the aftermath of World War II addressed the interdependences among societies and between humanity and the biosphere. The states attending the Rio Summit were not, however, able to agree on a common commitment to a text that could serve as the basis for future international law. All they did was adopt Agenda 21, which, while opening new avenues, did not make them binding avenues.

Downloads: doc_54_synthese_strategie_post_rio_20-en.pdf (490 KiB)