Children are today’s changemakers as well as tomorrow’s

Hello Sparkies!

I’m going to crack on with today’s newsletter in just a second, but one thing first: keep an eye on your inboxes tomorrow. That’s all I can say for now…

Today, November 20, is World Children’s Day. The day was established by the UN 70 years ago to “promote international togetherness, awareness among children worldwide, and to improve children's welfare.” Children and teenagers especially often get a bad rap, or are overlooked entirely, but I wanted to take a bit of time to recognise that young people are trying to improve the world around them, for everyone. 

Among the best-known child campaigners of recent years is Malala Yousafzai. She’s 27 now (which makes me feel old!) and has a degree from Oxford under her belt. It’s hard to imagine anyone in her family could have envisaged this, even though her parents were incredibly supportive of her getting the same education as the boys she grew up with.

Malala was born in the Swat Valley in Pakistan. In 2008, when she was 11, the Taliban took control of her town. They banned girls from going to school, but Malala wasn’t taking this lying down. As part of her efforts to tell the world about what she and other girls were facing, she wrote a diary for the BBC Urdu service under a false name describing life under the Taliban.

Over the next few years, she continued to speak out publicly about girls’ right to learn. International media got interested. For example, Malala was featured in a 2009 documentary made by the New York Times. 

But, as she writes on her own site, speaking out “made me a target”. One day, a masked gunman got on her school bus, asked which of the children was Malala, and then shot her point blank in the head, along with two of her friends. The next thing she remembers is waking up in a hospital in Birmingham, England, where her family settled. (Her friends also survived and moved to the UK – Malala helped secure them spots at a school in Wales.)

Instead of giving up after this unimaginable trauma, she was even more determined to be heard. Her activism went global. She co-founded a non-profit organisation, the Malala Fund, to invest in people finding ways to remove the barriers to girls’ education in their communities (you can read about the organisation’s own impact here). In 2014, she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, the youngest person to receive it at just 17. 

Worldwide scrutiny and media coverage of Malala’s horrifying experiences and courageous responses has been vital. It has raised people’s understanding of just how important it is to ensure all our children have access to a good education, regardless of their sex, location or social class. Long after the headlines have faded, Malala’s work still shines. 

Just this week, Apple TV is streaming Bread & Roses, a film that follows three women living under the Taliban. Malala is an executive producer.  

In April 2017 she became the youngest person ever to be given honorary Canadian citizenship. Her speech to parliament ended: “Let future generations say we were the ones who stood up. Let them say we were the first to live in a world where all girls can learn and lead without fear.”

“At ClientEarth we’re working to create a world that lasts, and where people have fair access to what they need.  

I work as part of our External Affairs team to publicise ClientEarth’s legal actions and opinions, and get them in front of the people who can make the changes we all desperately need to see. While our legal cases generally target one authority, one company, or one jurisdiction, the result – both in court and in public discourse – is designed to shift the dial on an international scale. 

We rely on journalists as key partners to expose harms, dig deeper, and hold governments and corporations accountable. What’s clear is that you do not get systems change without communicating.  

I’ve been at ClientEarth for 9 years – a wild period for both comms and the environment. A healthy environment is the basis for us to have any human rights at all – and this job is quite unique, because it directly fights for the two together.  

As lawyers, we formally present our legal arguments to judges in court. But judges are also human beings and the justice system sits in society, not a vacuum. In the 90s, when the climate conversation was in a very different place, you’d never have seen a ruling like KlimaSeniorinnen. 

~ Lucy here: That’s a groundbreaking case that was heard this year at the European Court of Human Rights. The court found that Switzerland’s failure to take action against climate change violated the human rights of its citizens - specifically the right to respect for private and family life, and (because lesser courts hadn’t heard the case properly) the right to a fair trial. ~

So how do you create an environment that enables judicial progress? Over time, good, intelligent communications, media investigations and press work, grounded in a substrate of science, builds a context in which a judge feels like they have a mandate to set groundbreaking precedent. 

More directly, the media is also vital to driving a judgment home. Legal wins are all very well, but without a good (and sustained) bit of aggro in the press, leaders are surprisingly good at burying them until they go away. 

This is why journalists are key change catalysts. Journalists were onto the CEO of the KLM airline immediately after we won a case in the Netherlands arguing that their advertising was greenwashing; reporters also grilled the UK’s energy secretary on live TV after we won our national climate case. 

Memorably, a journalist forced the energy giant RWE to admit on national news that the company was indeed knocking down German villages for coal mining. Embarrassment is very often a crucial component of campaigning – and journalists know how to dig.  

So, what’s next?

We’re currently going up against what – if built – would be Europe’s biggest plastics project. This project belongs to INEOS – a company with a glossy reputation for high-performance cycling, sailing, F1 racing … and, oddly, hand sanitizer. 

But INEOS is actually a petrochemicals company – this plant would convert oil and gas into the chemicals used to make plastic. ClientEarth’s lawyers are putting forward novel climate arguments to stop it.   

When we started taking action in 2019, plastics as a climate issue wasn’t a big agenda item – in society or the boardroom. But we’ve seen it take root over the past five years. Weaving in that messaging to a case like this complements the work of many others across the movement and starts to erode the mandate of industrial actors to just go ahead and build.  

Hooked on this case, media across Belgium and internationally are piling on public pressure (and alerting us to developments). Meanwhile, investigative journalists are looking into how UK Export Finance justified a £600 million guarantee for this project.  

This kind of publicity is another impediment to the project. INEOS has already pulled half of it, and this summer, its CEO Jim Ratcliffe publicly complained to the European Commission President that he “wouldn’t do the project again” if he’d known of the difficulties it would face. 

Arguing in the courts is just one part of the work we do. Issues go on trial, often much more quickly, in the court of public opinion. 

Communicating a case puts on the heat. The public raises an outcry, investors bridle, politicians have to make statements – and commitments.  

After we complained about BP’s “green” advertising campaign, they pulled it before the authority even investigated. We supported investors to take legal action to force Volkswagen to finally come clean about its climate lobbying – the issue didn’t come to court, but after business papers of the UK, Germany and Denmark ran the story, VW published those details regardless. 

We’ve got about 150 live cases right now and all of them are about issues that affect people directly, across the world. Whatever the issue, it’s always about justice – and we can’t get it if the issues aren’t out in the open.

Journalism and legal action are both routes to real accountability, to justice, and to systems change. Used together, and responsibly, they are a powerful force.”

I think it’s easy to look at the achievements of someone like Malala, or the global work of an organisation like ClientEarth, and feel intimidated by the scale of the change they’ve built. But what it really shows us is a single person can make a difference, either on their own or through collaboration. And good journalism can be both of those things; individual effort, and teamwork.

That’s it from me for today. I don’t know why, but this song’s been playing in my head for most of the week.

See you soon,

Lucy