Mediaboss Marketing

Whats going on? Democracy in action. Or is it democracy in decline?

The pessimist in me says that its a good time to be getting old. I am a septuagenarian, and with age comes wisdom (although, sometimes, age comes alone). The optimist in me, meanwhile, responds that crisis represents opportunity.

Young folks, please pay attention: Our country, the world, desperately needs your 100% buy-in to deal with so many issues. The opening lines here were far from a complete list.

As Americans, we have been blessed. Our wise forefathers constructed a Constitution and within a few years amended it to include a Bill of Rights. The bill includes freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of religion, and the right to bear arms.

What is not explicitly stated, but certainly implied, is that with rights come responsibilities: to be respectful of others, to be tolerant, and to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is not a religious diatribe but rather a common-sense approach to addressing the myriad issues confronting our increasingly complex society. Our current lifestyle is way beyond anything our forefathers could have envisioned.

Might our American Constitution be in need of some revision? Perhaps, but there are things we can certainly consider in the interim.

Marches, protests, and walkouts should continue, provided they remain peaceful and without property destruction. Consequences should be imposed for any destruction or violence.

Social-media hate, manipulation, haranguing, and propaganda remain a tough issue, a work in progress within our free-speech norms.

With regard to the right to bear arms, how about mandatory prison time for any crime committed with a gun? How about outlawing all automatic weapons, including bump stocks? For what purposes are such deadly weapons needed? I am a hunter and occasional trap shooter. I understand a handgun for personal or home-security purposes. But other firearms needs befuddle me. Is gun control the answer? Some areas with the strictest gun laws have some of the worst statistics relative to gun violence. Stop and frisk significantly reduced crime in New York City. Might that be applied, with improved guidelines, elsewhere?

Racism and religious and political intolerance are longtime challenging issues. Immigration similarly begs for a solution, not just posturing. Political correctness has outlived any utility it ever had. Media, can you help diagnose and examine these issues? Politicians, get with it; be responsible to your constituents. Citizens, quit whining and get engaged; vote out ineffective elected leaders.

I am encouraged with the growing recognition and acceptance, even if slow, of evolution as the keystone to our earthly existence. Change is not only possible; its the norm. Adaptation and survival of the fittest apply to all plant and animal life (including humans) and even inanimate elements like geology and topography. As humans, we are blessed with opportunities to advance ourselves, our families, our communities, and our nations. Lets lead by example, by doing unto others as we would have them do unto us.

For with rights come responsibilities. Thats democracy in action.

Tom Wheeler was a longtime Duluth-area businessman, civic leader, and philanthropist. Retired he splits his time between Duluth and Tucson, Ariz., and is a regular contributor to the News Tribune Opinion page.

Go here to see the original:
Local View Column: Democracy in action demands that with rights come responsibilities - Duluth News Tribune

In October, a confrontation erupted between one of the leading Democratic candidates for the United States presidency, senator Elizabeth Warren, and Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg. Warren had called for a breakup of Facebook, and Zuckerberg said in an internal speech that this represented an existential threat to his company.

Facebook was then criticised for running an advert by President Donald Trumps re-election campaign that carried a manifestly false claim charging former vice-president Joe Biden, another leading Democrat contender, with corruption.Warren trolled the company by placing her own deliberately false advert.

This dustup reflects the acute problems social media poses for all democracies. The internet has in many respects displaced legacy media such as newspapers and television as the leading source of information about public events, and the place where they are discussed.

But social media has enormously greater power to amplify certain voices, and to be weaponised by forces hostile to democracy, from Russian trolls to American conspiracy theorists.

This has led, in turn, to calls for the government to regulate internet platforms to preserve democratic discourse itself.

But what forms of regulation are constitutional and feasible? The US Constitutions First Amendment contains strong free-speech protections. Although many conservatives have accused Facebook and Google of censoring voices on the right, the First Amendment applies only to government restrictions on speech; law and precedent protect the ability of private parties such as the internet platforms to moderate their own content.

In addition, section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act exempts them from private liability that would otherwise deter them from curating content.

The US government, by contrast, faces strong restrictions on its ability to censor content on the internet in the direct way that, say, China does. But the US and other developed democracies have nonetheless regulated speech in less intrusive ways.

This is particularly true regarding legacy broadcast media, where governments have shaped public discourse through their ability to license broadcast channels, to prohibit certain forms of speech (such as inciting terror or hard-core pornography), or to establish public broadcasters with a mandate to provide reliable and politically balanced information.

The original mandate of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) was not simply to regulate private broadcasters, but to support a broad public interest. This evolved into the FCCs fairness doctrine, which enjoined television and radio broadcasters to carry politically balanced coverage and opinion.

The constitutionality of this intrusion into private speech was challenged in the 1969 case, Red Lion Broadcasting Co vs FCC, in which the Supreme Court upheld the commissions authority to compel a radio station to carry replies to a conservative commentator.

The justification for the decision was based on the scarcity of broadcast spectrum and the oligopolistic control over public discourse held by the three major television networks at the time.

The Red Lion decision did not become settled law, however, because conservatives continued to contest the fairness doctrine. Republican presidents repeatedly vetoed Democratic attempts to turn it into a statute and the FCC itself rescinded the doctrine in 1987 through an administrative decision.

The rise and fall of the fairness doctrine shows how hard it would be to create an internet-age equivalent. There are many parallels between then and now, having to do with scale. Today, Facebook, Google and Twitter host the majority of internet speech and are in the same oligopolistic position as the three big television networks were in the 1960s. Yet it is impossible to imagine todays FCC articulating a modern equivalent of the fairness doctrine.

Politics is far more polarised; reaching agreement on what constitutes unacceptable speech (for example, the various conspiracy theories offered up by American radio show host Alex Jones, including that the 2012 school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut was a sham) would be impossible.

A regulatory approach to content moderation is therefore a dead-end, not in principle but as a matter of practice.

This is why we need to consider antitrust as an alternative to regulation. The right of private parties to self-regulate content has been jealously protected in the US; we dont complain that The New York Times refuses to publish Jones, because the newspaper market is decentralised and competitive.

A decision by Facebook or YouTube not to carry him is much more consequential because of their monopolistic control over internet discourse. Given the power a private company like Facebook wields, it will rarely be seen as legitimate for it to make such decisions.

On the other hand, we would be much less concerned with Facebooks content moderation decisions if it were simply one of several competitive internet platforms with differing views on what constitutes acceptable speech. This points to the need for rethinking the foundations of antitrust law.

The framework under which regulators and judges today look at antitrust was established during the 1970s and 1980s as a byproduct of the rise of the Chicago School of free-market economics.

As chronicled in Binyamin Appelbaums recent book, The Economists Hour, figures such as George Stigler, Aaron Director and Robert Bork key players in the Chicago School of Economics launched a sustained critique of over-zealous antitrust enforcement. The major part of their case was economic: antitrust law was being used against companies that had grown large because they were innovative and efficient.

They argued that the only legitimate measure of economic harm caused by large corporations was lower consumer welfare, as measured by prices or quality. And they believed that competition would ultimately discipline even the largest companies. For example, IBMs fortunes faded not because of government antitrust action but because of the rise of the personal computer.

The Chicago School critique made a further argument, however: the original framers of the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act were interested only in the economic effect of large scale, and not in the political effects of monopoly. With consumer welfare the only standard for bringing a government action, it was hard to make a case against companies such as Google and Facebook that gave away their main products for free.

We are in the midst of a major rethinking of that inherited body of law in light of the changes wrought by digital technology. Economists and legal scholars are beginning to recognise that consumers are hurt by lost privacy and foregone innovation, because Facebook and Google sell users data and buy startups that might challenge them.

But the political harms caused by large scale are critical issues as well, and ought to be considered in antitrust enforcement. Social media has been weaponised to undermine democracy by deliberately accelerating the flow of bad information, conspiracy theories and slander.

Only the internet platforms have the capacity to filter this garbage out of the system. But the government cannot delegate to a single private company (largely controlled by a single individual) the task of deciding what is acceptable political speech. We would worry much less about this problem if Facebook was part of a more decentralised, competitive platform ecosystem.

Remedies will be difficult to implement: it is the nature of networks to reward scale and it is not clear how a company like Facebook could be broken up. But we need to recognise that although digital discourse must be curated by the private companies that host it, such power cannot be exercised safely unless it is dispersed in a competitive marketplace. Project Syndicate

Francis Fukuyama is a senior fellow at Stanford University and co-director of its programme on democracy and the internet

More here:
Web threatens democracy and must be regulated without limits on freedom of speech - Mail and Guardian

For the last 300years the world was changed by mass movements of people demonstrating and then as the franchise was extended, by voting. Not anymore. The age-old means of winning change no longer seem to be working.

2019 was the year of marches, rallies and demonstrations,with more people voting in elections than ever before. But nothing has changed. From Extinction Rebellion demonstrators disrupting London and other cities to almostthe entire population of Hong Kong occupying its streets to demand democratic rights from their communist overlords in Beijing, from the mass protests in Lebanon to huge rallies in India against the nationalist anti-Muslim identity politics and Hindu supremacism of Narendra Modi,it seemed as if the world and especially the young world was on the move anddemanding more democracy. And yet the year endedwith the upholders of the status quofirmly in control.

Thousands of Russians have been arrested in anti-Putin demonstrations;Paris was disrupted by gilets jaunes protests and now by massive transport strikes; London saw two of its biggest ever demonstrations when up to one million people marched to demand a Final Say on Brexit. But the men running Russia, France and Britain are unmoved and still firmly in charge. Major general elections were also held in India, South Africa, Spain, Poland, Australia, Israel, Denmarkand Switzerland, but voters, when they could be bothered to turn out, simply voted for the status quo.

Sharing the full story, not just the headlines

The European Parliament had an election, but the hopes of European political groups that having a so-called Spitzenkandidat, a lead figure from the left, the centre-right or Liberals, wouldanimate votersflopped too. Once the elections were over, the Eurocrats and national governments took over and installed at the top of the European Commission, the European Central Bank, the EU foreign service and the European Parliament politicians nominated by national government who were never on any ballot paper in the European Parliament elections.The voters of Europe were told once again that it was the nation states of Europe who decided who would run the show.

The old 1968 graffiti If voting everchanged anything theyd abolish it has never been more true.

The protests in Lebanon began as a spontaneous burst of anger over new taxes. On October 17, mostly young men came on to the streets in the capital Beirut and across the country. They clashed with police and lit fires.

Richard Hall / The Independent

The new taxes included a levy on the messaging service WhatsApp. In a country where people were already struggling, it was the final nail in the coffin.

Richard Hall / The Independent

Protesters continued to clash with police into the second night. Downtown Beirut became a battleground as volleys of tear gas rained down on demonstrators.

Richard Hall / The Independent

By the third day, the mood changed. The violence of the first two nights ebbed and numbers swelled. People came out by their thousands across the country.

Richard Hall / The Independent

The protesters took control of the streets. They also reclaimed public space that had been off limits to them for years. This image was taken from a grand theatre in downtown Beirut that had been shuttered since the civil war.

Richard Hall / The Independent

Here, two protesters look towards downtown from the top of a building nicknamed "the egg" for its dome-like structure. It was part of a complex that was under construction when war broke out in 1975, and it has remained empty and off-limits ever since.

Richard Hall / The Independent

Women have played a key role in these protests. They have been on the frontline of demonstrations and sit-ins which had a marked effect reducing violence. For the first week, police didn't know how to deal with them. In this picture, a woman police officer tries to negotiate with a protester to remove a road block. She was part of a team of women police officers sent out on this day.

Richard Hall / The Independent

This image was taken during a police attempt to remove people from blocking a road. Again, the presence of woman at the front of the sit-in led to the police abandoning the attempt.

Richard Hall / The Independent

Protesters said the road blocks were vital in keeping up pressure on the government. Without them, they would be ignored.

Richard Hall / The Independent

Some of the roadblocks were more relaxed than others.

Richard Hall / The Independent

The protests may have started in Beirut, but they have sprung up around the country. This photograph was taken in Tripoli, Lebanon's second largest city. Protests there have outsized those in the capital Beirut. The city has been called the "bride of the revolution."

Richard Hall / The Independent

The scenes in Tripoli are even more remarkable given its recent history. For years it has been plagued by extremism and violence. These mass displays of unity in the city's main square every night have done a lot to counter other Lebanese citizens' perception of Tripoli.

Richard Hall / The Independent

Tripoli is also one of Lebanon's poorest cities. The protests here have been fuelled by desperation of poor people struggling to get by.

Richard Hall / The Independent

But the protests have not been without their opponents. As demonstrations entered their second week, the Lebanese Hezbollah movement began to show anger at protesters for their demand that all Lebanon's political leaders stand down. In this image, police stand between protesters and a group of Hezbollah supporters in downtown Beirut. Clashes broke out when they left.

Richard Hall / The Independent

The worst violence of the protests came towards the end of the second week. Several hundred supporters of Hezbollah and its political ally Amal attacked protesters who were blocking the main ring road in Beirut. Afterwards, they stormed into downtown and destroyed a protest encampment.

Richard Hall / The Independent

But the protesters came back to the main square, made a mountain from the poles of destroyed tents and placed a flag in it. The same day, Lebanon's prime minister Saad Hariri resigned, given protesters their first major victory.

Richard Hall / The Independent

The protests in Lebanon began as a spontaneous burst of anger over new taxes. On October 17, mostly young men came on to the streets in the capital Beirut and across the country. They clashed with police and lit fires.

Richard Hall / The Independent

The new taxes included a levy on the messaging service WhatsApp. In a country where people were already struggling, it was the final nail in the coffin.

Richard Hall / The Independent

Protesters continued to clash with police into the second night. Downtown Beirut became a battleground as volleys of tear gas rained down on demonstrators.

Richard Hall / The Independent

By the third day, the mood changed. The violence of the first two nights ebbed and numbers swelled. People came out by their thousands across the country.

Richard Hall / The Independent

The protesters took control of the streets. They also reclaimed public space that had been off limits to them for years. This image was taken from a grand theatre in downtown Beirut that had been shuttered since the civil war.

Richard Hall / The Independent

Here, two protesters look towards downtown from the top of a building nicknamed "the egg" for its dome-like structure. It was part of a complex that was under construction when war broke out in 1975, and it has remained empty and off-limits ever since.

Richard Hall / The Independent

Women have played a key role in these protests. They have been on the frontline of demonstrations and sit-ins which had a marked effect reducing violence. For the first week, police didn't know how to deal with them. In this picture, a woman police officer tries to negotiate with a protester to remove a road block. She was part of a team of women police officers sent out on this day.

Richard Hall / The Independent

This image was taken during a police attempt to remove people from blocking a road. Again, the presence of woman at the front of the sit-in led to the police abandoning the attempt.

Richard Hall / The Independent

Protesters said the road blocks were vital in keeping up pressure on the government. Without them, they would be ignored.

Richard Hall / The Independent

Some of the roadblocks were more relaxed than others.

Richard Hall / The Independent

The protests may have started in Beirut, but they have sprung up around the country. This photograph was taken in Tripoli, Lebanon's second largest city. Protests there have outsized those in the capital Beirut. The city has been called the "bride of the revolution."

Richard Hall / The Independent

The scenes in Tripoli are even more remarkable given its recent history. For years it has been plagued by extremism and violence. These mass displays of unity in the city's main square every night have done a lot to counter other Lebanese citizens' perception of Tripoli.

Richard Hall / The Independent

Tripoli is also one of Lebanon's poorest cities. The protests here have been fuelled by desperation of poor people struggling to get by.

Richard Hall / The Independent

But the protests have not been without their opponents. As demonstrations entered their second week, the Lebanese Hezbollah movement began to show anger at protesters for their demand that all Lebanon's political leaders stand down. In this image, police stand between protesters and a group of Hezbollah supporters in downtown Beirut. Clashes broke out when they left.

Richard Hall / The Independent

The worst violence of the protests came towards the end of the second week. Several hundred supporters of Hezbollah and its political ally Amal attacked protesters who were blocking the main ring road in Beirut. Afterwards, they stormed into downtown and destroyed a protest encampment.

Richard Hall / The Independent

But the protesters came back to the main square, made a mountain from the poles of destroyed tents and placed a flag in it. The same day, Lebanon's prime minister Saad Hariri resigned, given protesters their first major victory.

Richard Hall / The Independent

Commentators and academic analysts pour over these figures and gravely inform us that the left is finished,that some imagined liberal eraisover to be replaced by populist identity politics. Some argue that voting systems are to blame. But, in 2019, the worlds many voting systems were made use of and they all produced the same result.

Voters are nervous of change and unconvinced by any of the political offers that imply a new start or a challenge to conventional thinking. It is the era when change began with some powerful, convincing new ideas argued by intellectuals,converted into campaigns with demonstrations, petitions and other mobilisations, then finally were either adopted by parties or gave rise to new political movements and even new parties, that is truly over.

Pressure groups proliferate; we have more think tanks funded by wealthy donors than ever before. Yet the sum of all their energy, conferences, papers and comment pieces in the press do not add up to a convincing whole and certainly have less and less impact on voting or on government policy.

International bodies such as the International Labour Organisation and Nato celebrated 100 and 75 years of existence in 2019, but workers have never been weaker with deunionisation(outside the protected public sector) now the norm in Britain, the US, most of Europe and elsewhere in the world. Vladamir Putin runs rings around Nato, while Donald Trump can barely conceal his contempt for it.

The hopes of world government what Tennyson calledthe parliament of men, the federation of the world seem even further away than when he invoked his vision 150 years ago.

2019 finishes a decade in which less progress was marked than at any time since 1945.

Democratic advance has stalled. Filling to streets and voting in the ballot box appears to change nothing. So what happens next? That is the question to which the 2020s must provide an answer.

Denis MacShane is the former minister of Europe and author of Brexiternity:The Uncertain Fate of Britain

Continue reading here:
2019 was the year of democracy that changed absolutely nothing - The Independent

People take part in a pro-democracy protest in Hong Kong on Sept. 29. Adryel Talamantes/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Its become fashionable to wonder whether the liberal international order can survive the malign forces that have been lining up against it during the 2010swhat the Wall Street Journal called the Decade of Disruption.But based on recent trends, its a fair bet that democracy, globalism, and open trade will endure handily into the third decade of the 21st century.

Start with the state of democracy. Nothing has been more alarming to internationalists than the one-two punch of U.S. President Donald Trump and British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who have taken power in two of the worlds oldest and most important democracies by awakening the old demons of nationalism. With Trump focusing his ire on NATO and the World Trade Organization, and Johnson stalking out of the European Union, the two leaders have transformed the once-hallowed special relationship from a bulwark of global stability (sullied though it was by the Iraq War) into what looks more like a wrecking ball. Elsewhere, illiberalism has overtaken young democracies, such as Hungary and Poland, and even threatened mature ones with the rapid rise of nationalist parties such as the Alternative for Germany and Norbert Hofers anti-immigrant Freedom Party of Austria. In the worlds largest democracy, India, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party appear to be sending the same message. And there are considerable doubts about whether the democratic body politic possesses an immune system strong enough to fight off a plague of cyber-generated misinformation and disinformation, and systemic hacking by such autocrats as Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But democracy just wont give up, and in 2019which could justly be called the year of global protestit kept reinventing itself at the grassroots. This has been happening in the most unlikely of places around the globe, in countries such as Iran, Lebanon, Iraq, Chile, and above all in Hong Kong, where thousands of determined protesters have braved bullets and tear gas, embarrassing Chinese President Xi Jinping even as he brutally consolidates his autocratic rule on the mainland. Perhaps the U.S. and British democracies are becoming decadentand 2020 will tell us a lot about that question come Novemberbut the idea of democracy remains a powerful, ever-replenishing urge that, as sociologists and political scientists have long told us, only gets stronger the more that income and educational levels increase around the world.

The international economy is also undergoing some severe stress testsand surviving remarkably intact. The year 2019 began with deep-seated fears that Trumps trade wars would help trigger a global recessionand among the most concerned was Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, who midway through the year suggested he and other central bank chiefs simply didnt know how bad things could get. The thing is, Powell said, there isnt a lot of experience in responding to global trade tensions. Growth and investment are still slowing due in large part to the uncertainty Trump has created, but fears of a recession have receded. It turns out the U.S. president cannot single-handedly return the United States to the days of Smoot-Hawleyeven his fellow neonationalist Boris Johnson believes in free tradeand the domino effect of retaliatory tariffs that followed in the 1930s, setting the stage for world war. (In June 1930, under the Smoot-Hawley Act, the United States raised tariffs to an average of 59 percent on more than 25,000 imports; just about every other nation reacted in tit-for-tat protectionist fashion, severely depressing the global economy.)

Today, the complexities of a deeply integrated global economy and its supply chains may prove too much to undoeven for the most powerful person on the planet.

And what of the institutions of the international system? The United States has always had an uneasy relationship with its post-World War II progeny, principally the United Nations, the WTO, and NATOdespite helping create themand Trump only gave expression to an American id that was long seething under the surface. True, Trump is demeaning these institutions to an unprecedented degree and demanding far more of them. But hes only saying more stridently what was said by, say, President Barack Obama, who also criticized the NATO allies for being free-riders, and former President George W. Bush, whose administration privately mocked the alliance and sneered at the U.N. (Another little-remembered precursor to Trump was President Bill Clintons feisty first-term trade representative, Mickey Kantor, who once said he wasnt interested in free-trade theology and preferred that Americans behave like mercantilists.)

Trump is making a serious run at denuding the WTO by taking down its appellate court, but even that institution is likely to outlast a 73-year-old president who, at most, has only four more years in office to wreak havoc on the global system. This is especially likely because he is now mostly alone in his anti-globalist passion with the departure of his deeply ideological national security advisor, the militant John Bolton.

Lets not forget either that the advent of Trump and Johnson represents a legitimate backlash to major policy errors made by the elites who have dominated the international system. George W. Bush led the Republican Party badly astray with his strategically disastrous Iraq War and fecklessness over the deregulation of Wall Street, which set the stage for the biggest financial crash since 1929 and the Great Recession. That turned voters off to traditional Republican thinking and opened the door to Trumps unlikely takeover of the party. Something similar happened in Britain, when Bushs partner in these neoliberal economic delusions and his ally in an unnecessary war, the once-popular Labour leader Tony Blair, set the stage for Labours eventual handoff to the socialist Jeremy Corbyn. (A shift that was, in turn, analogous to the ascent of Sen. Bernie Sanders, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and the left inside the U.S. Democratic Party in response to the rise of Trumps 2016 presidential rival Hillary Clinton, who was seen as pro-war and too friendly to Wall Street.)

But the larger point is that Trump and Johnson are only the latest stresses to a system that, since the end of the Cold War, has suffered some pretty major ones and yet endured. In the quarter-century since then, financial markets collapsed several times, and the global economy has remained intact. Islamist terrorists have struck at major capitals around the world, and a clash of civilizations hasnt ensued. The worlds two largest economies, the United States and China, incessantly bicker, but theyre still doing business. Ivory tower realists continue to be dead wrong in their predictions that the international system will fall back into anarchy, even when politicians like Trump are doing their best to make that happen. On the realist view, the so-called West and its institutions should have disintegrated after the Cold War with the disappearance of the Soviet Union; as Owen Harries wrote in Foreign Affairs in 1993, The political West is not a natural construct but a highly artificial one. It took the presence of a life-threatening, overtly hostile East to bring it into existence and to maintain its unity. It is extremely doubtful whether it can now survive the disappearance of that enemy.

Instead, these international constructs only expandedso rapidly and intensively that they generated a backlash. And that expansion is plainly still outpacing the efforts to block or destroy it, especially as we see other nations forging free trade deals behind Trumps back. Above all, while plainly Americas stature as stabilizer of the international system has been seriously set backfirst by Bush, most recently by Trumpthere is some positive news even in the impeachment drama now underway. Although Trump is all but certain to be acquitted in the Senate, the impeachment vote in the House, following weeks of testimony by career U.S. diplomats, was a dramatic reaffirmation of traditional American values for fair dealing not just with Ukraine, but with all nations.

Perhaps, for now, that will be enough to keep things intact.

Link:
Why the Liberal International OrderFree Trade, Democracy, and GlobalismWill Survive the 2020s and Donald Trump - Foreign Policy

The declaration by the Dil in May last year that Ireland is facing a climate and biodiversity emergency would suggest that there is Government recognition of the scale and seriousness of the climate crisis.

This year marks the beginning of a decade in which global emissions must reduce by 55 per cent, if the 1.5 degree limit in the Paris Agreement is to remain at all feasible. However, Ireland has consistently underperformed and ranks among the worst performing countries in Europe. This under-performance has been increasingly called out by environmental NGOs as well as grassroots and youth-led movements.

It is in this context and, following the recognition by the High Court in 2017 of an implied constitutional right to an environment that is consistent with human dignity and wellbeing, that environmental democracy must be protected and strengthened rather than threatened and restricted.

Environmental democracy ensures that the State is fully transparent and accountable to the public about policy decisions that affect them and their environment, and provides participatory opportunities for communities to determine land and resource use. It involves the right to freely access information about the environment; the right to participate meaningfully in environmental decision-making; and access to justice when those rights are denied. These rights are protected in the Aarhus Convention, which has been part of the EU legal order since 2005 and was ratified by Ireland in 2012.

However, proposals contained in the new Housing and Planning and Development Bill 2019 to safeguard the timely delivery of projects and value for public money look to significantly restrict environmental democracy. The legislation would, according to the Environmental Pillar, a coalition of national environmental organisations, row back on major changes introduced just a few years ago to enable ordinary people, their organisations, and environmental NGOs to challenge bad environmental decisions. Those changes were already long overdue and necessary to comply with EU law and the Aarhus Convention.

If passed, the Bill, brought forward by Minister for Housing Eoghan Murphy, would add new cost requirements and standing restrictions to bring Judicial Review proceedings in relation to planning decisions. While individuals and groups can appeal local authority planning decisions to An Bord Pleanla, decisions made by the national planning authority can only be challenged through judicial review proceedings in the High Court, an already costly and time-consuming process.

Under the Bill, many individuals and NGOs would lose the right to take cases to court on environmental matters. Currently, NGOs enjoy broad standing rights to bring environmental challenges and the public generally enjoy the right to challenge decisions. However, the Bill proposes that applicants show substantial interest (rather than the current sufficient interest) and must be directly affected by a proposed development in a way which is peculiar or personal. The new proposals also require NGOs to be in existence for three years and have a minimum of 100 members. This would not only eliminate many grassroots community groups that form sporadically in reaction to local environmental issues but would also rule out many national NGOs from taking legal challenges such as Friends of the Irish Environment, a group that has brought many important legal challenges in recent years.

The Bill also proposes changing the special costs rules that currently apply to judicial reviews of decisions which have an impact on the environment. In these types of cases, the normal rule, that the losing side must pay the winning sides legal costs, is not applied. This allows cases to be taken without the fear of an enormous costs order, should they fail. Such cases are generally taken on a no-foal, no-fee basis as legal teams have the possibility of recouping costs if the case is successful, is of exceptional public importance and where it is in the interests of justice.

The Bill proposes creating a protective costs cap for individual plaintiffs of 5,000, 10,000 for groups and 40,000 for defendants. This risks making it prohibitively expensive (as well as unpredictable in terms of expected costs) for the public and environmental NGOs to take legal cases, dis-incentivising litigation. It is unlikely that it would be considered compatible with the Not Prohibitively Expensive Rule under the Aarhus Convention and related EU Directives. This curbs the wide access to justice that both demand.

The Bill represents a retrograde step in terms of fulfilment of our obligations under EU law. However, in the context of the climate and biodiversity emergency, we should not facilitate access to the courts in environmental matters simply because the EU tells us to. Mobilisation within communities around environmental matters is increasing and should be encouraged particularly in the context of the successive failures of government. The Bill, in its current form, will have a chilling effect on environmental litigation and will seriously damage environmental oversight and democracy in relation to bad and unlawful planning decisions.

Rose Wall is chief executive of Community Law & Mediation

View original post here:
Housing bill flies in the face of environmental democracy - The Irish Times