Gorbachev To Visit India In May
Former President of the erstwhile Soviet Union and Green Cross International (GCI) chairman Mikhail Gorbachev will visit India in May this year to inaugurate the first public hearing on the principles of Earth Charter draft.
Revealing this here, the Earth Charter co-ordinator for the GCI and a close aide of the former President, Rustom Khairov said Gorbachev was interested in either setting up Earth Charter committees or branches of the GCI in the country to create awareness about the importance of the initiative, first floated at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit.
Gorbachevs visit is being arranged in the context of an agreement signed between the GCI and the Dehradun-based Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra, a non-governmental organisation, which will organise the public hearing here.
The proposal to create an earth charter can be traced to a 1987 report of the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development which recommended that the UN undertake to consolidate and extend relevant legal principles in a new charter to guide state behaviour in the transition to sustainable development.
The World Commission had also proposed that the new charter be subsequently expanded into a convention setting out the sovereign rights and reciprocal responsibilities of all states on environmental protection and sustainable development.
The Rio Earth Summit, however, failed to reach an intergovernmental agreement on the Earth Charter.
In 1994, a new initiative was started through the collaborative efforts of Maurice Strong, acting as chairman of the Earth Council, and Gorbachev in his capacity as Green Cross International chairman.
According to Khairov those who helped to facilitate the organisation of the new earth charter project were Jim Mac Neill, former secretary general of the World Commission on Environment and Development, and former Netherlands Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers.
Khairov said the first international workshop on the Earth Charter was held at the Peace Palace in the Hague in May 1995, in which representatives from 30 countries and 70 organisations participated.
Following this event, the secretariat for the Earth Charter project was established at the Earth Council at Costa Rica and an Earth Charter management committee chaired by Maurice Strong established to oversee the project operations.