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The climate summit brought together some 60 international leaders on Monday at the UN. The goal of the Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, was to give a boost to commitments in the fight against global warming, while the predictions of scientists are increasingly alarmist. But apart from the speeches of the others, it is the intervention of the young Swedish activist Greta Thunberg who caught the attention.
With our correspondent at the UN, Carrie Nooten, and our special correspondent , Murielle Paradon
Dressed in pink, her voice trembling, Greta Thunberg expresses her anger at the leaders of the world. They came to boast about their progress in protecting the environment. The young Swedish activist brutally brings them back to the reality of the climate emergency, with this vibrant indictment.
" I should not be here, I should be at school on the other side of the ocean. Now you come before us young people to talk to us about hope! How dare you ? You stole my dreams and my childhood, with your empty words. And again I am among the lucky ones. People are suffering, people are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are at the beginning of a mass extinction and all you are talking about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you ? "
Long applauded, Greta Thunberg leaves the podium and gives way to the speeches of heads of state. Surprised, Donald Trump who was not supposed to attend the summit, throws a head a few minutes. The American president, who is reluctant to defend the climate cause, arrives at the moment when the young Swede leaves. He is surrounded by an imposing security device, he will not even see it.
A recorded complaint
The teen does not disappear from the media scene right away. With fifteen other young people supervised by Unicef, she decided to formally lodge a complaint against five countries that had violated the Charter of the Rights of the Child, in the name committee of the United Nations. A symbolic and historic complaint to demand a real change now so that the climate crisis does not have a negative impact on their daily lives, and to protest against the lack of action on the part of the current governments.
They are aged between 8 and 17, are delegates from Alaska, Tunisia, the Marshall Islands or Palau ... All have personally experienced episodes of climate crisis, that's why they decided to file a complaint. Iris Duquesne, 16, made the trip to Bordeaux and is as angry as the others.
" It's absolutely not normal for children to get to this point where we have to get up and ask the adults, scream for our future. We have a right to complain, they have a right to protect us, they have not done so, so we use the right to complain and ask them to do something. "
For more efficiency, their lawyer advised them to target five of the most influential countries in the Commission for the Rights of the Child, France is among them. This complaint especially wants to push to consider the climate crisis from another angle, as the lawyer Scott Gilmore explains, of the firm Hausfeld.
" What will help make a difference is to recognize that the climate crisis is an attack on human rights. Very often, we talk about it because we are not in phase with the Paris agreement, because we have not achieved this or that goal. But this failure to meet our emission reduction goals actually means threatening a child's life. "
Young people will also walk through New York City on Friday at the end of the UN General Assembly.