The International Criminal Court (ICC) and International Court of Justice (ICJ) are under mounting pressure to effectively address both Israel’s ongoing conflicts, war crimes by unaccountable authoritarian regimes, and the climate crisis. Their work to date has had little effect on these crises killing millions, and if anything represents that failure of international law.
Fair Start urges both tribunals to admit that as it stands he ICC and ICJ’s claimed value add of justice to the world does not actually account for having to empower the subjects these institutions claim to represent, and for the massive child inequity our collective failure to empower children has caused: Treating children of color as deserving of less and disenfranchising them.
That’s illegal, and a mistake that caused horrible outcomes, including allowing our governments to never actually empower the people they claim to represent.
Background
Recent filings before the United Nations Human Rights Council, and African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, have detailed peer-reviewed research tracing millions of deaths in the unfolding climate and related crises to a very specific failure in the design of human rights, and reproductive rights, systems decades ago. The failure (by elevating autonomy over political equity) privatized the constitutive creation of power relations, gutting the effective impact of all child-rights regimes and setting the stage for a growth-based climate crisis in which only the impoverished face serious threats. The move was – at the most fundamental level – illegal because under it there are no legal protections for / obligations to the most vulnerable: children are brought into conditions that violate their rights, with after-the-fact interventions and applications of rights, after adults have already gotten the benefit of exploiting them. This in turn threatens political legitimacy, inserting a false premise in which citizens have been expected to follow the law without actually being empowered by it.
More specifically, as described below, we invoke your obligations under the best interpretations of preambular collective pronouns (“We . . .”) in things like state and local constitutions, as interpreted under precedent to ensure one-person, one self-determinative vote and other areas of constitutional law, as well as the Article I and other provisions of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), to ensure the political and constitutional self-determination of your constituents.
Governments do not have the right to change the meaning of disenfranchisement in order to escape responsibility for that wrong. A government’s authority depends on fair representation and accurate measures of harm. That authority comes from the people’s ability to govern themselves—not only those alive today, but also future generations. When governments create policies about birth and development mainly to boost the economy instead of empowering citizens, they are exploiting people. This not only harms individuals, but also undermines the government’s own right to govern. The damage done by such policies must be measured honestly and compensated fairly.
Your authority derives from and is contingent on accurate assessment and the remediation of threats to the political self-determination of your constituents (roughly eight standards revolving around restorative climate emission levels), rather than your benchmarking to the commercial self-determination of constituents – the system of exploitation over empowerment driving the climate crisis. Many of the standards currently in use to assess and remediate harm (like high permissible levels of climate emissions enabled by diluted levels of democracy / representative ratios that favor the influential) are the same standards that caused the harms and are drastically different from the number set necessary for political legitimacy, allowing many to avoid liability. This amounts to moving the goalposts to allow for harm that was illegal – in violation of children’s rights (under the Children’s Convention and many other instruments) to be measureably empowered, and governments’ (whose authority is fully derivative) first duty to ensure that empowerment.
The meaning of terms like “we,” and the equal protection and political enfranchisement precedent deriving from that meaning, requires equal offsets of one another’s political influence relative to zero or neutral standard, which in turn requires minimal thresholds of wellbeing and empowerment for all children (consistent with state obligations under the Children’s Convention and other instruments), high thresholds that are inconsistent with the low thresholds and standards being used by many nations. Those same standards were used by many of the nonprofits funded by wealthy families (families plagued with an interest convergence problem in the face of the crucial family reforms they ignored) claiming to watchdog such nations.
Instead, the preemptive standards are based a concrete metric centered on constitutive political equity and self-determination (starting with climate restoration through enhanced democratic representation), rather than using the current commercialized standards of welfare that begin (based on a fiction inserted into human rights in the Twentieth Century to avoid child equity) by exploiting infants for economic growth, driving the climate and related crises by enriching some at deadly cost to others, with the commercial self-determination of some made at cost to the political self-determination of others.
There are massive differences between the two standards in terms of things like permissible emissions, levels of democratic representation, minimal birth and development conditions for children consistent with the Children’s Convention, etc. The current, more commercial standards are illegal and killing millions.
The Fair Start Movement is urging both tribunals to confront a deeper truth: Their jurisdiction and legitimacy derive only from measurable empowerment of those they claim to represent.
Any value or impact claim made today is likely out of context because it ignores children entering the world in vastly inequitable conditions as a key factor impacting the veracity of the claim. This goes beyond greenwashing to a more fundamental or first order problem – equity – equitywashing, or the hiding of illegitimate, inequitable, and birth-based power relations that ensure defining standards like “green” in a way that enriches some at deadly cost others, and causes the climate crisis.
Equitywashing (disenfranchising to set low standards for “humane” and “green” – a first-order form of fraud the precedes greenwashing and humanewashing) derives from the fundamental subversion of racial justice movements in the Twentieth Century through policies that privatized family planning and thus the fundamental creation of power relations, rather than making the process equitable or empowering.
This was a sleight of hand and power grab by wealthy families and governments that assumed authorities and entitlements rather than legitimating them, treating the idea of freedom from power as freedom from the coercion of the state rather than the ability to consent to any influence of others, and using unsustainable and inequitable reproductive rights standards designed to enrich some children at deadly cost to others. The move ensured most people would assume freedom was the absence of government coercion, when that power actually originated in the creation of birth and development positionality/power relations.
This allowed many to use their privileged birth positionality to live lives that were more other-determining than self-determining – degrading freedom for all. Using this standard ensured we did more harm than good- and by their own standards – because children entering the world was not some futuristic and economic consideration but the first determinant of political equity and true freedom.
Linking Climate, Conflict, and Equity
Fair Start highlights that both the climate crisis and persistent conflicts stem from the same root: governments and wealthy elites securing power through systems that disenfranchise children at birth. This practice of equitywashing—ignoring how children enter the world in inequitable conditions—creates illegitimate standards for “green,” “humane,” and even “just” governance, enriching some at the deadly expense of others.
Supplementing Global Submissions
Fair Start is further strengthening its legal case by supplementing its submission to the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights with both new affidavits and an expert witness statement. These filings advance the claim that no system of international law or constitution can create legitimacy unless it conditions its authority on ensuring that no child is born beneath a threshold of resources necessary for self-determination.
Freedom Through Fair Starts
The Movement us urging the ICC and ICJ to recognize that freedom is degraded when birth inequity allows some to live lives more other-determining than self-determining. True justice requires systems of family planning that empower every child equally, ensuring democratic representation and climate sustainability.
According to Mwesigye Robert, who helps lead a growing coalition called Truth Alliance that demands those making value and impact claims actually account for the preemptive obligation to ensure children entering the world are measurably empowered, “We all have a powerful opportunity to add value through addressing child inequality as a chance to uplift every child, everywhere. When children of color are recognized as equally deserving, Funders and communities can build futures that are more just, resilient and full of possibility.”
Fair Start Movement
Fair Start is distinguished because of its courageous challenge to the foundations of international law. By demanding that tribunals like the ICC and ICJ admit their authority comes exclusively from child empowerment, Fair Start is redefining what justice means in the 21st century. If legitimate governance, including the authority to assign wealth, derives from empowering the people, then we all have preemptive right to ensure institutions like international tribunals treat the violation of children’s birthrights as a horrific cost, and not a benefit to be exploited for growth.