Core documents
Our position statement
In September 2023, a team of scientists quantified, for the first time, all nine processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth system. These nine Planetary Boundaries were first proposed by Johan Rockström, head of the Stockholm Resilience Centre at Stockholm University, and a group of 28 internationally renowned scientists in 2009. The Planetary Boundaries are the safe limits for human pressure on the nine critical processes which together maintain a stable and resilient Earth. The 2023 update report [1] not only quantified all boundaries, it also concluded that six of the nine boundaries have been transgressed. The findings of the Stockholm Resilience Centre were corroborated by an annual ‘Planetary Health Check’ published by Planetary Boundaries Science and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research [2].
The fossil fuel industry continues to operate at full capacity in the midst of a climate and ecological emergency largely due to the support of several “enabler” industries, including financial services, public relations, insurance, and, crucially, the legal sector. Among these, the legal sector plays a pivotal role, particularly in facilitating projects that expand fossil fuel infrastructure. A fundamental shift in the legal industry, away from advising and supporting fossil fuel companies and toward renewable energy, would send a strong signal through society that supporting new fossil fuel extraction is not only ethically indefensible but potentially unlawful.
In this regard, the British legal industry, with its global influence, is a critical point of intervention. The legal industry globally also continues to operate in an ‘ecocidal’ manner. Since the Paris Agreement, 55 law firms have facilitated over £1.48 trillion in fossil fuel projects, more than 2.5 times the amount these firms facilitated for the renewable energy industry according to data from Law Students for Climate Accountability (LSCA), published in their 2023 report “The Carbon Circle: The UK Legal Industry’s Ties to Fossil Fuel Companies” [3] which analyses law firms’ work on fossil fuel transactions, as well as their lobbying activities for the fossil fuel industry and representation of fossil fuel companies, for example in Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS) arbitration.
Lawyers Are Responsible (LAR) is an unincorporated association of lawyers – both solicitors and barristers – working to tackle the climate & ecological crises, principally by seeking to change the legal profession’s role in enabling the current and future consequences of the actions of the fossil fuel industry. LAR’s mission was widely publicised, in part through a short film projected onto the Royal Courts of Justice in March 2023 [4]. The launch was accompanied by a Declaration of Conscience, where as an act of civil disobedience over 180 lawyers globally pledged to withhold their services from (i) supporting new fossil fuel projects; and (ii) action against climate protesters exercising their democratic right of peaceful protest [5].
LAR aims to build on the original Declaration of Conscience to address objectives such as de-legitimising legal support for fossil fuels by making it professionally unacceptable for law firms to advise on new fossil fuel projects. This would remove a critical support structure for the fossil fuel industry. LAR has written to several ‘Magic Circle’ law firms [6] to request that they withhold their services in respect of new fossil fuel projects, but has not received a commitment from any of them to do so. Our focus is now turning to employees within these firms.
LAR has instructed leading Counsel in Employment law, Claire McCann and Hana Abas of Cloisters Chambers, to prepare an Opinion on certain scenarios where lawyers who are practising may hold deep convictions about tackling the climate crisis. Counsel’s Opinion was delivered on 15 November 2024.
COUNSEL’S OPINION
The Opinion covers three areas of activity that individual lawyers can engage in at work:
Refusing work connected with fossil fuel extraction in certain circumstances (‘conscientious objection activities’);
Blowing the whistle in respect of their employers, clients or third parties in certain circumstances (‘whistleblowing activities’);
Exercising their democratic right to peaceful protest outside of their workplace, including where this leads to criminal sanctions (‘protest activities’).
For individuals engaged in conscientious objection activities, such as refusing to work on fossil fuel projects, their belief in the climate crisis and the moral duty to avoid catastrophic climate change is potentially protected under human rights and discrimination law. This means that they cannot be unlawfully discriminated against, harassed or victimised because of their climate-related protected beliefs, so long as they have manifested their beliefs in an appropriate way and there is a sufficiently close and direct connection between their refusal to do the work and their beliefs. The more directly identifiable the impact on the climate crisis of the work that they are objecting to is, the more likely it is that a refusal do the work will be protected. These protections apply to barristers and solicitors alike, although the former may face more challenges than the latter due to the ‘cab rank rule’; the self-employed are unlikely to breach it in practice.
For those blowing the whistle for climate-related reasons, protections will apply to ‘workers’ meaning solicitors and partners in law firms, but not self-employed barristers. Whistleblowing activities involve a disclosure of information that the individual reasonably believes is in the public interest which falls within defined categories of wrongdoing (and to a specified person or persons). These categories of wrongdoing include circumstances that endanger health and safety or the environment, and can stretch as far as to include endangerment of the environment as a whole, through the medium to long-term effects of carbon emissions or the endangerment of the health and safety of the population at large in the future through climate impacts. Legal professional privilege does not apply as an exemption from the protections where the advice is sought by the client to further a crime, fraud or similar – and which can include an environmental crime (the ‘iniquity exception’).
Finally, for those engaged in protest activities, disciplining an employee for the mere act of attending a peaceful climate-related protest is unlikely to constitute a justified interference with their human rights by their employer (or Chambers). Even in the event that the attendance of the protest involves the individual receiving a criminal sanction, the employer or Chambers (or indeed, the individual lawyer’s regulator) will need to weigh up many factors to ensure that any action taken is proportionate and does not interfere with the individual’s rights to peacefully protest in a climate and ecological emergency.
OUR NEXT STEPS
LAR will be building a campaign to educate staff about their rights as conscientious objectors, to whistleblow on wrongdoing and to engage in peaceful protest. Alongside this Position Statement, we have prepared an executive summary and worked scenarios for use as a teaching tool in Law Schools and Universities. We encourage our lawyer colleagues who have read this Position Statement to sign our Declaration of Conscience and to join us at peaceful protests. There is only one Earth.
LAWYERS ARE RESPONSIBLE
17 November 2024
NOTES:
[1] Richardson, J., Steffen W., Lucht, W., Bendtsen, J., Cornell, S.E., et.al. 2023. Earth beyond six of nine Planetary Boundaries. Science Advances, 9, 37, available at: https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adh2458
[2] The Executive Summary of the 2024 Planetary Health Check is available at: https://www.planetaryhealthcheck.org/storyblok-cdn/f/301438/x/a4efc3f6d5/planetaryhealthcheck2024_report.pdf
[3] The Carbon Circle: The UK Legal Industry’s Ties to Fossil Fuel Companies, available at : https://www.ls4ca.org/blog-show-all/the-carbon-circle
[4] Available on the homepage of: www.lar.earth