Climate catastrophe is the future. This is not a prophecy but a simple consequence of physics. Humanity has not witnessed, for millions of years, our current reality of melting ice caps, historic levels of oceanic warmth and acidity, and extreme levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

As we face these crises, governments are taking advantage and gathering dangerous levels of power in the name of our own protection.

While the world’s attention is turned toward the COVID-19 pandemic, the disruption to daily life and the suffering and death caused by the coronavirus are simply a preview—and a relatively minor one—of the disaster by way of climate calamities that await the human race in just a few, short decades. 

How will humanity respond to this challenge? If the global reaction to the novel coronavirus is any indication, the future is not good. Many people today exist in a state of shock from the pandemic, unable to digest the trauma—the economic damage, loved ones falling ill or dying, an inept government response, and the anxiety caused by the virus itself. 

In the meantime, governments are taking advantage of the situation by imposing new forms of surveillance, assuming incredible emergency powers, and laying the groundwork for a potentially indefinite form of “crisis dictatorship”. 

It is our job to understand, expose, and fight against this future through all lawful means. The framework of human rights provides the best means to do this—both as we face the threat of the novel coronavirus today and fight to keep a habitable planet into the future.

GOVERNMENTS ARE MUTATING INTO CRISIS DICTATORSHIPS

A crisis dictatorship is a government that rules by decree in the name of essential physical security. It is the classic Hobbesian Leviathan—a state that cares not for the consent of the governed, but only for the ability to protect the collective from the relentless suffering that comes about from a lawless and violent state of nature. 

Governments around the world are attempting to convert their domestic systems into various  forms of crisis dictatorship, plainly taking advantage of the pandemic to accumulate power and  mutate into a government that is dangerous to civilisation, the rule of law, democracy, and human rights.

Cruelty is the chief characteristic of a crisis dictatorship. In China, for example, the government appears to have first downplayed the lethality of the virus, silencing the doctor who first blew the whistle and later died from COVID-19, even while releasing statistics about infections and mortality that increasingly appear manufactured. The harsh measures in Wuhan that were put in place by China’s police state would not be permissible in many other countries.

It seemed for a time that the virus had met its match in brutality with the Chinese government, but with infections re-emerging and doubts about China’s data, it is not at all clear that harsh measures were by themselves effective in containing the virus.

Furthermore, the pandemic has taken the spotlight off the one million Uyghurs still detained in China’s concentration camps, and who are likely victims of the pandemic as well. In China, the government justifies state terror and truth distortion in the name of basic safety.

Western governments are increasingly enthralled with the spell of crisis dictatorship, as well. With the President of the United States declaring that keeping American deaths to 100,000 would reflect a “good job” coupled with unprecedented levels of American unemployment, the incompetence of the United States government is plain.

Even as it struggles to cope with the pandemic, the United States continues to impose devastating economic sanctions on Iran and Venezuela, which face decimation not just from the virus itself, but also from the crippling poverty imposed by a global superpower.

And on 14 April 2020, President Donald Trump stunned the world—and described the essence of a crisis dictatorship—by declaring that his “authority is total” in determining the response to the coronavirus.

In smaller countries, the quick evolution of government into crisis dictatorship is most pronounced. In Hungary, Victor Orban assumed sweeping emergency powers, which grant him the right to rule by decree indefinitely. The European Union thus far appears incapable or unwilling to prevent this power grab. In the Philippines, lawmakers used Zoom to grant President Rodrigo Duterte new emergency powers, which include the ability to jail people deemed to be spreading false information about the virus for up to two months. Anyone causing trouble can be shot dead on the spot.

These examples serve as a warning to people living in liberal democracies that their governments may turn on them at any time—not unlike how one’s immune system fights itself, shuts down, and hastens death in the last stages of coronavirus infection.

The use of surveillance technology, in particular, to limit the spread of the virus—which can be life-saving and consistent with human rights when necessary and managed by health experts—presents a chilling opportunity for governments to further control their citizens. Surveillance for purposes of national security is largely accepted in the national consciousness of both United States and United Kingdom citizens, even when such surveillance has dubious legal grounds. Using the threat of a public health emergency to elicit a manufactured “consent” of citizens to more robust and intimate forms of surveillance is proving too tempting for both Eastern and Western world leaders who wish to quell dissent. 

JUSTIFYING HUMAN RIGHTS VIOLATIONS: FROM TERRORISM TO ENVIRONMENTAL CRISES 

In the age of the first coronavirus pandemic (SARS) in 2003, governments were already justifying infringements on basic rights, relying on the threat of terrorism as the basis for augmenting their powers. Democracy, citizens were told, could be maintained alongside emergency powers that could protect the “homefront” or the “homeland” from dangerous terrorists and enemies of the state. The United States and the United Kingdom, waged wars of aggression, engaged in torture, electronic surveillance, and drone assassinations; they then excused—or even celebrated—these actions as necessary measures to preserve civilisation from barbarism.

Today, the grounds for emergency powers have shifted from terrorism and national security into more pernicious and deviant forms of control based on environmental threats to human life and safety. Ironically, decades of government bungling and intentional mismanagement created the very crises heads of state now claim as the basis for their power-grabs. Environmental threats now surface as a main excuse for the exercise of indefinite emergency powers, greater government surveillance, and extensive control over how and where a person spends their day. 

Foucault discussed the ways that governments manage “biopower” of their citizens through the regulation and management of physical spaces such as prisons, offices, or schools. Now, instead, physical quarantines, combined with additional measures like governments’ tracking their citizens’ locations by way of GPS on mobile phones, permit vast control and micromanagement of persons in response to increasingly existential threats. Citizens must consent to such control in order to avoid dying from quick-spreading infection or environmental degradation. 

THE CLIMATE CRISIS PRESENTS DEVASTATING CHALLENGES TO THE HUMAN RACE

As environmental and ecological crises mount, so does the opportunity for governments to evolve into dangerous crisis dictatorships. Scientists estimate that close to one billion people will be at risk of rising sea levels by 2050—in addition, tens of millions may be exposed to heat waves, climate-fueled natural disasters, or even ancient viruses released from the melting permafrost in the Arctic.

In tandem, the biosphere itself is undergoing a massive extinction event, the sixth such event in 500 million years. Humanity is living in an era of mass extinction. 

The reality is that the world does not go back to normal with the end of a pandemic. This pandemic is the beginning of a new chapter. We bear witness today to the beginning of a new century: The Crisis Century.

Even as global economic activity has largely halted because of government quarantines, and the smog temporarily lifts from certain cities, humanity’s fate remains sealed without further transformational action. As climate scientists have noted for years now, a complete cessation of economic activity is not at all sufficient to prevent massive changes to the planet’s climate system. Some scientists suggest that governments must sequester up to 1 trillion tons of greenhouse gases, immediately, to keep the planet safe for human habitation. 

In other words: even as so many of us sit at home, wondering what happens next, the Ragnarok that our civilisation unwittingly unleashed decades ago—and now knowingly feeds and sustains—continues unabated. The truth is that controlling and defeating this pandemic is an anthill in comparison to the Everest of stabilising the climate and keeping Earth habitable. The technical and industrial challenges associated with retooling human civilisation to sustain the global biosphere will dwarf challenges like going to the Moon, building the Great Pyramids, and the taming of the coronavirus. The social challenges will also be immense. The pyramids, after all, were built by slaves. And as people around the world are discovering, the political challenges of bringing to heel out-of-control governments that are openly mutating into crisis dictatorships will rival or even exceed the scientific challenges that lay ahead.

THE HUMAN RIGHTS FRAMEWORK CAN HELP US STABILISE THE CLIMATE AND PRESERVE CIVILISATION

The challenge of this century is two-fold. It is not enough to preserve human civilisation and not enough to protect the biosphere; the manner in which the human race addresses this terrible Crisis Century is as important as solving the problem itself. We cannot build a decent, civilised future that has as its foundation enduring forms of slavery or control.

Fortunately, we have already developed a framework that provides ready-set solutions to the crises of our times: it is the framework of human rights. The principles of human rights, as set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the major human rights treaties such as the ICCPR and ICESCR, provide a coherent and thorough policy framework for governments to adopt in order to stabilise the climate, restore the biosphere, and maintain and preserve human civilisation this century and for centuries to come.

First, governments must wake up to the reality at hand. They must begin immediately preparing and implementing a long-term strategy to maintain a planet suitable for human habitation. 

Second, this planning must be done in a manner consistent with human rights.

For example, human rights law demands that governments prioritise the right to life, including the right to a life on a habitable planet. The protections of the right to life are paramount under human rights law, and cannot be revoked, even in terms of emergency. As a jus cogens norm, from which states may not depart, defending the right to life is the essential obligation of every government. 

In a world beset by catastrophes, prioritising the right to life means addressing climate change, restoring the biosphere, and keeping the Earth in ecological homeostasis. The right to life includes a dignified life, meaning that governments must provide related social resources such as proper housing, the ability to access universal healthcare, and access to education—all things that people need to maintain basic standards of living. 

Human rights law demands that governments protect the right to work, which means providing decent jobs that permit people to support themselves. Governments can support the right to work through re-manifesting the global economic system to both restore and maintain the biosphere while also stabilising the climate to prevent imminent environmental breakdown. Human labor must be geared towards the clean-up and restoration of the planet as a whole. In order to preserve our civilisation, we must live differently. We must remember, though, that this process will take generations to accomplish, even as we begin immediately.

Human rights law additionally protects the right of self-determination for all people. This means, for example, that governments must mitigate where possible and otherwise prepare for the great migration of human beings that will take place this century as sea levels inevitably rise, and as much of the planet grows inhospitable to human life.

In time, and with extensive planning, it may be possible to undo this damage. Without immediate action, however, every person’s ability to determine his or her own future, both individually and collectively, will be subject to irreversible infringement. 

Human rights is the only realistic framework for governments and people to work together to preserve what remains of civilisation, and to lay the groundwork for our descendants to continue this work for centuries to come. 

We can no longer wait for governments to change their ways.

That time has passed.

Like the coronavirus itself, governments have mutated into a form that is truly dangerous to the human species.

In defeating the virus, we must forge new relationships, new alliances, and new ways of looking at the world in order to ensure both our physical safety and the safety of human rights and democracy itself.

We must live and think differently, perhaps dramatically differently.

And after we have tackled this already-extraordinary challenge, the true battle for our shared civilisation—a battle that will test us in physical, social, political, and spiritual ways—awaits at the horizon.

Dave-Inder Comar (JD NYU Law, MA Stanford University, BA Stanford University) is the Managing Partner of Comar Mollé LLP, a corporate technology law firm, and the Executive Director of Just Atonement Inc., a non-profit human rights law firm. He practices in the United States and internationally. He is a co-founder of Human Rights Pulse.