By Anne Petermann, Executive Director, Global Justice Ecology Project
Christina Figueres, Executive Director of the UNFCCC at the Durban Climate COP in 2011. Photo: Langelle/GJEP
For the first time since 2004, Global Justice Ecology Project did not sent any representatives to the annual UN Climate Conference (COP). There were numerous reasons for this decision, one of which was a letter sent to us by Ms. Christina Figueres, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) “suspending” three Global Justice Ecology Project activists from participating in Doha. The list includes Lindsey Gillies, Keith Brunner and me–Global Justice Ecology Project’s “Head of Delegation.” We were officially banned from participating in any of the UNFCCC negotiating sessions in 2012 as well as any future sessions unless we sign a document agreeing to their terms to abide by their special “code of conduct” for observers. Right.
Our crime? Direct action. Unpermitted, disobedient direct action in both Cancun and Durban designed to highlight the mounting repression against non-corporate observers. (We also worked for over a year to help organize the amazing Reclaim Power action and Peoples’ Assembly at COP 15 in Copenhagen, which exposed the ineffectiveness of the UNFCCC and called for people to take their power back–though the letter did not mention that).
Over the years we have watched the UNFCCC become more and more like the World Trade Organization that we and many anti-corporate globalization organizations rose up against in the latter 1990s and early 2000s.
