This marks a world first: A group of citizens will be heard by a United Nations oversight body on the subject of the Olympic Games. On Monday, October 20, the JOP 2030 citizens’ collective learned that it would be heard in Geneva, at the UN’s Palace of Nations, by the compliance committee tasked with the Aarhus Convention on «environmental democracy,» in a preliminary admissibility hearing scheduled for November 18. This is only the fourth time in history that a case involving France has been examined in depth.
These citizens, residents of the French Alps, have asked that their voices be heard regarding the 2030 Alpine Winter Olympic Games. «So far, not a single citizen has been consulted on a project whose carbon footprint is estimated at 804,000 metric tons of CO₂, the equivalent of more than 473,000 round-trip Paris-New York flights, with costs that could reach up to €2.1 billion in public funds,» said Jérôme Graefe, a Paris-based attorney who filed the request on behalf of the citizens’ collective and a range of organizations including Attac, the Human Rights League (LDH), Mountain Wilderness and France Nature Environment.
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