Out of climatic conviction, young lawyers want to put an end to the incessant air travel that punctuates relations between their professional orders. At the initiative of the Young Bar of Quebec, eight “junior” legal organizations from the Francophonie are committed to traveling less by air. They hope to convince the entire profession to do the same.
The “judicial returns” are the main target in the sights of young lawyers. At these annual meetings, members of each bar gather to attend speaking engagements, ceremonies and trainings. The tradition is that the organizers invite representatives of other bars in the French-speaking world. Conversely, Quebec lawyers will participate in the judicial re-entries abroad.
“When it’s back to school in Paris, the boards of directors of all the bars are invited to go there. Three weeks later, it’s Versailles: everyone is moving once again to the other side of the ocean. Then after three weeks, it’s Brussels: everyone travels again to meet essentially the same people and relive the same pattern of activities, ”explains Chloé Fauchon, president of the Young Bar of Quebec.
This transatlantic waltz — in which the “senior” bars participate as much as the young bars, bringing together lawyers with less than ten years’ experience — serves to forge international relations between judicial communities and to exchange good practices. However, a new generation of lawyers sees it as an unsustainable habit in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.
“This model seemed outdated to us”, reports Me Fauchon, who discussed the issue with his organization’s board of directors. According to her, the repercussions of these international meetings held repeatedly are not always very tangible. And above all, she deplores the “unreasonable” environmental cost of such air travel. Remember that a round trip between Quebec and Europe represents approximately 1.5 tons of CO2 per passenger.
From Haiti to Luxembourg
For the moment, the pandemic has put a brake on the sending of delegations to the judicial re-entry abroad. Last spring, however, Me Fauchon was surprised to see the tradition restart “without anyone questioning it”. At the same time, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sounded the alarm again. “I can’t pretend it doesn’t exist,” she says.
The president has therefore made the file her hobbyhorse. With the help of her peers from the Young Bar of Quebec, she organized a discussion last September with counterparts from other young bars in the French-speaking judicial world. “In principle, everyone was in agreement,” she says. In January, the first groups put their signature on the draft declaration in the making.
On Wednesday, eight young bars announced that they had made a commitment to reduce their air travel: these are the organizations of Luxembourg, Brussels, Coteaux (Haiti), Marseille, Aix-en-Provence, Geneva and Quebec, as well as the Association of young bars in the Quebec region.
The signatories will attempt to ensure that only one judicial re-entry involving transatlantic travel is held per year. This would be organized alternately between America and Europe. Each signatory will also have the mandate to put pressure on his “senior” bar so that it adopts the same eco-responsible practice.
“We all have a role to play,” says M.e Fauchon. With the information we have now, which is making headlines every day, we cannot sit idly by and put the blame solely on governments. This pattern of thought perpetuates immobility. Our wish is to break this model so that the legal community, and business people in general, question its ways of doing things. »