Thirty-one human rights organisations have written to the climate and environment ministers of Tuvalu and Ireland, asking them to treat human rights as a core issue at the second International Conference on Transitioning Away From Fossil Fuels, which the two countries are now leading.
The letter was signed by the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) together with 30 other organisations.
The conference is a state-led process devoted to a single question — how governments leave fossil fuels behind — a formulation that entered diplomatic language through the outcome of the twenty-eighth UN climate conference. The letter’s argument is that the question cannot be handled as one of energy supply and markets alone.
What the first conference established
The inaugural edition, convened by Colombia and the Netherlands, recognised the urgent need to phase out fossil fuels through policies that advance all human rights and economic justice, and that protect environmental defenders. The signatories credit that outcome to civil society mobilisation around the first meeting.
Their request is that those three threads — rights, economic justice and the protection of defenders — carry over into the substance of the second conference rather than remaining a line in the record of the first.
Why the handover matters
Tuvalu is a low-lying Pacific island state among those most exposed to sea-level rise, which gives its role at the head of this process particular weight for small island states. Ireland joins it in the chair as the process passes from its Latin American and European hosts.
A climate process framed as a rights question
Addressing the letter to climate and environment ministries situates the phase-out debate in human rights terms rather than environmental ones alone. A transition away from fossil fuels reaches into work, housing, health and access to energy; it affects communities living near extraction sites and workers employed in the sector; and it involves environmental defenders, who in many countries face prosecution or attack because of what they campaign against.
The published letter does not state when or where the second conference will convene.
This report was produced by the HuMedia newsroom.
