How to Start an Online Youth Climate Court
Steps to Set up an Online Youth Climate Court via Zoom:
Can a Youth Climate Court be conducted virtually, using an online platform such as Zoom? Yes. Absolutely.
In 2018, the international judges who served on the Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal Session on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change in May of that year, were initially uncertain whether a Tribunal Session could be conducted fully online. By the end of that week-long series of hearings, though, the judges were pleasantly surprised and announced that they now enthusiastically endorsed the online format.
The judges saw the potential of Zoom technology to “overcome the economic constraint of limited resources which impede what should be a permanent, timely exercise of assessing, monitoring, preventing and transforming the universe of violations which occur in the present global scenarios.” They pronounced that the experiment of conducting online hearings had been “a resounding success.” They recognized the online format as “a flexible and powerful tool which could allow the [human rights] struggles of the communities of the world to become more globally and more timely known.”
That week of online Tribunal hearings was the first of its kind anywhere in the world and yet, despite what the judges called “inevitable but instructive” glitches, they saw Zoom’s online format as opening new possibilities for ordinary people to conduct human rights trials wherever they are needed.
Conducting Youth Human Rights Courts online has the same powerful potential. The first interations will be experimental and may present unexpected challenges, but youthful creativity will find creative solutions.
Following are steps to help you get started.