August 28, 2013  – James Delingpole – The  Telegraph

Come to unspoilt Scotland. Not.

Over the last year or so, I’ve been getting emails from two campaigners – Irish engineer Pat Swords and Christine Metcalfe, a retired community councillor from Argyllshire – urging me to report on their campaign to have Britain’s and Ireland’s renewable energy policy declared illegalunder the UN’s Aarhus Convention.

I never got round to doing so, not because I didn’t wholeheartedly support them but because I thought: “Naaah. Ain’t never going to happen.”

I mean: how could it possibly? The United Nations, as we know, is the very belly of the beast; the onlie begetter of almost all the world’s most far-reaching and dangerous environmental policies. It was under the auspices of two UN organisations – the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organisation – that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established. As I report in Watermelons, even as far back as 2004 it was responsible for launching over 60,000 environment projects – each with its crack team of sustainability consultants, conservation biologists and other pseudo-science looters draining the public purse for dubious green causes. Worst of all, the UN is the home of Agenda 21, probably the single most all-encompassingly fascistic policy ever devised. Or, as I describe it in the book:

Agenda 21 effectively puts an end to national sovereignty, abolishes private property, elevates Nature above man and places a host of restrictions on what we’ve come to accept as our most basic freedoms – everything from how, when and where we travel to what we eat.

How could an organisation as corrupt, depraved and enslaved by deep-green ideology possibly do anything to help the little guy against the depradations of Big Green?

Well, it seems I owe Pat Swords and Christine Metcalfe an apology. Like most people I hate saying “sorry”. But on this occasion, I’m overjoyed to have the opportunity.

Here’s how the Independent reports it:

Plans for future wind farms in Britain could be in jeopardy after a United Nations legal tribunal ruled that the UK Government acted illegally by denying the public decision-making powers over their approval and the “necessary information” over their benefits or adverse effects.

The new ruling, agreed by a United Nations committee in Geneva, calls into question the legal validity of any further planning consent for all future wind-farm developments based on current policy, both onshore and offshore.

The United Nations Economic Commission Europe has declared that the UK flouted Article 7 of the Aarhus Convention, which requires full and effective public participation on all environmental issues and demands that citizens are given the right to participate in the process.

Yes, I thought “too good to be true” too. But even the wise Richard North appears to think the story has legs.

As too does one expert lawyer:

Says David Hart, QC, an environmental lawyer, “This ruling means that consents and permissions for further wind-farm developments in Scotland and the UK are liable to challenge on the grounds that the necessary policy preliminari

Continue Reading  at: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100232949/wind-farms-are-a-breach-of-human-rights-says-un-no-really/

August 30, 2013 – Principia Scientific  International

This week Christine Metcalfe, 69, a Scottish community councillor, scored a stunning landmark legal victory bringing to a halt the UK government’s unlawful and unpopular wind energy initiative. In effect, all British wind farm development is mothballed until grassroots public consent is granted – if ever.

Below Christine provides her personal insights on this extraordinary long running battle in which Britain and the EU were ruled to have breached citizens’ rights, protected under the UN’s Aarhus Convention.

A personal view on the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee’s draft decision on Complaint Ref. ACCC/C/2012/68

By Christine Metcalfe

Initially, like millions of others, I believed the claims made relating to wind power technology. I wanted to. It seemed to wipe away the perceived problem of climate change by using a free source of energy!

I also cherished the belief that in an open democratic and Europeanised society policies and public participation in decision making were open, rational and defensible. So I have some sympathy with those who have yet to appreciate that both the UK and the EU created immense and powerful mechanisms for counteracting climate change without the open scrutiny, intellectual accountability and checks and balances which lie at the heart of the Aarhus Convention, and which at our peril we take for granted.

So the independent Committee’s Ruling will be extremely valuable in

highlighting issues that must be rectified in the public interest. But despite the subject matter it is not just about renewable energy policy or fixes for climate change: its principally about practice, participation and transparency. It shows that it is not merely possible, but imperative that our authorities are held to account not only by experts, but by ordinary citizens at the ‘grass roots’ of society.

The complaint – stemming from local injustices in a far-flung corner of Argyll, but driven by seemingly unassailable EU-wide policies with an ostensible global rationale – has enabled exposure of an increasing disconnect between authorities. They have become politicised and committed to the current orthodoxy, despite increasing scientific and technical evidence to the contrary. It is the very lack of open-ness, scrutiny and accountability that has allowed this to go so far that it is in danger of becoming immutable and those who challenge it branded as heretics rather than democrats.

The informed public must now be more willing and able to deploy the Committee’s Ruling whenever the need arises. This is especially true now that the tentacles of political will are using government organisations to further their aims. Continue Reading at: http://principia-scientific.org/supportnews/latest-news/293-citizens-rights-defeats-uk-government-in-landmark-wind-energy-ruling.html#.UiCqJ-pTNak.gmail