海平面上升的“人性面”: 保护受影响的人

My task today is to speak to you about the protection of persons affected by sea-level rise. This is one of the sub-topics that the Commission is dealing with—yesterday you heard a lot about the law of the sea issues, and the First Issues Paper. And this year, there is a new issues paper, the Second Issues Paper, which was prepared by myself and my verydear colleague and Co-Chair, Mr. Juan José Ruda Santolaria, who will speak to you next on the sub-topic of statehood, which composes the three sub-topics that the Commission is looking at. Of course, what we are going to present to you has to do with the stage of the work that we are at, with regard to the two sub-topics of statehood and protection of persons, which form part of the Second Issues Paper and that are at an earlier stage than the law of the sea issues discussed in the First Issues Paper, which had a full discussion in the Commission and also had feedback from States in the Sixth Committee. We are still in an earlier stage, and we are to adopt our own report on the discussions of the Study Group and then the Sixth Committee will also make its comments. What we are presenting is certainly more preliminary in nature than what was discussed yesterday.

On the topic of the protection of persons affected by sea-level rise, I call it the “human face” of sea-level rise. This is, as we all know, a phenomenon that has multifold dimensions and has the potential, on the human dimension, not only to affect the enjoyment of human rights, but it can also lead to significant internal or international movement of persons. This is something that came out very clearly from our paper and research that there is not a dedicated legal framework or a distinct legal status for persons affected by sea-level rise. That is the starting point of our paper, and in the paper, we proceeded to do a mapping of the potentially applicable legal frameworks pertaining to the protection of sea-level rise, from human rights law to humanitarian law, refugee law, and law concerning migrants, disasters, and climate change. We have tried to do this mapping exercise, and I refer you to the paper, more in a descriptive than a prescriptive nature, and also taking into account that in many cases this potentially applicable legal framework is of a soft law character—I will come back to some of the examples.