Youth Climate Courts
How You Can Host a Human Rights Trial for People and Planet

This book focuses on Youth Climate Courts, a bold new tool that young people in their teens and twenties can use to compel their local city or county government to live up to its human rights obligations, formally acknowledge the climate crisis, and take major steps to address it.

Tom Kerns shows how youth climate leaders can form their own local Youth Climate Court, with youth judges, youth prosecuting attorneys, and youth jury members, and put their local city or county government on trial for not meeting its human rights obligations. Kerns describes how a Youth Climate Court works, how to start one, what human rights are, what they require of local governments, and what governmental changes a Youth Climate Court can realistically hope to accomplish. The book offers young activists a brand new, user-friendly, cost-free, barrier-free, powerful tool for forcing local governments to come to terms with their obligation to protect the rights of their citizens with respect to the climate crisis.

This book offers a unique new tool to young climate activists hungry for genuinely effective ways to directly move governments to aggressively address the climate crisis.

Tom Kerns is Director of Environment and Human Rights Advisory and Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at North Seattle College, USA. His work brings human rights norms to bear on environmental issues, especially on the climate crisis. In 2015 he served on the drafting group for the international "Declaration on Human Rights and Climate Change", and from 2014 until 2018 he co-organized the 2018 Permanent Peoples’ Tribunal Session on Human Rights, Fracking and Climate Change. He is co-editor, with Kathleen Dean Moore, of Bearing Witness: The Human Rights Case Against Fracking and Climate Change (2021), a book based on the testimony and findings in that Tribunal.