Global News Podcast: Does failure to address climate change violate human rights?

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Die Menschenrechte ist hier in der Cate, brought by 2.000 Frauen, accusing the Swiss government of violating their human rights through its failure to act on climate change.

Some of the biggest names in global technology are calling for a pause in the development of advanced artificial intelligence,

and clerics at the Kiev-Pechersk Lavrov or monastery of the caves in Kiev are being evicted by the Ukrainian government

amid concerns over their links to the Russian Orthodox Church. Also in this podcast.

A specific target group from especially the UK and Italy who are only coming to Amsterdam with the belief that we are a theme park.

Amsterdam's city council wants to discourage young British people from travelling there.

We start with what's being seen as a big legal moment in the fight against climate change.

A group of 2.000 women is accusing the Swiss government of violating their human rights through its failure to act.

The case will be heard in the European Court of Human Rights. It is the first time the court will hear a case on the impact of climate change on human rights.

Elizabeth Stern is one of the plaintiffs.

We do hope that the judges in Strasbourg are free from a political agenda,

and actually just look at our case in terms of is climate protection a human right?

Because we have a right for life, we have a right for health.

Are those articles violated or not? And that's what we want an answer from them.

Imogen folks is our correspondent in Switzerland, and I asked her what the legal case for these women was.

Well they have gone to the court in Strasbourg armed with their medical records,

and it is proven that older people are particularly with heat waves more affected, their health is more affected.

So they have gone with their own records with cases of breathlessness, dizziness, just having to stay in for days,

or sometimes weeks on end with these ever more frequent heat waves that we get in Switzerland now.

And what they are saying is, this situation violates our right to health, possibly right to life, because there is a higher mortality rate during these heat waves,

and it violates our right to a family life, because we have to stay in, we can't go out and see people, we can't enjoy life as we normally would.

So that is their case, we should say the European Court does not have a right to a healthy environment on its statute book,

but what it does have is the right to life, right to health and right to family life, so that is their case.

Now this is the first case of its kind, as such, how important is it?

It's hugely important, because the Court could potentially order Switzerland to do more to tackle climate change,

work harder at reducing its greenhouse gas emissions, that's one of the key things these Swiss women want.

And if it does that, that is a precedent then, not just for Switzerland, but for the 46 member states of the Council of Europe, who are part of the European Court of Human Rights.

And this is the first case, but it's not the last.

Later, this afternoon in fact, there is a case coming from France, and then over the course of the next couple of months, a case coming from young people in Portugal.

So, very, very interesting time, and it will be very interesting to see what the outcome of this first case is.

Das war's imagine folks.

Warnings of artificial intelligence outsmarting us and causing mayhem in some dystopian way have not come to pass yet,

but some of the biggest names in global technology are now calling for a pause in the development of advanced AI,

until appropriate safety measures have been developed and implemented.

The letter from them comes just a couple of weeks after the release of OpenAI's GPT-4, which is the most powerful AI system ever released.

It's led to fears that we are rapidly and unwittingly heading towards catastrophe.

In the letter, the signatories pose the following questions.

Should we let machines flood our information channels with propaganda and untruth? Should we automate away all the jobs, including the fulfilling ones?

Should we develop non-human minds that might eventually outnumber, outsmart, obsolete and replace us?

Should we risk loss of control of our civilization? Such decisions must not be delegated to unelekted techleaders.

There are some big names on the list of signatories like Elon Musk, Apple's co-founder Steve Wozniak and Sean O'Hegarty,

whose director of the AI Futures and Responsibility Programme at the University of Cambridge.

He spoke to the BBC's Sarah Montague.

It seems a bit funny to be calling for a pause in AI progress, given how exciting all this progress is and the beneficial applications that there will be of it.

But there are a bunch of practical issues with the systems that we're deploying at the moment,

from making up false facts, to exacerbating potential inequalities, through to propagating bias in the data sources.

And it's becoming increasingly difficult for governance to keep up with it.

We've seen a rhetoric emerging recently, particularly among the tech companies,

and that they're all in a race to develop large models and to release them.

And we've already seen some kind of smaller scale examples of problems with these systems.

Microsoft Chatbot went off the rails a few times and threatened a journalist.

Galactica from Meta had to be taken offline last year after it was making up fake scientific papers.

So I don't know if we necessarily need a pause this year on AI progress on the largest models,

but I think it's a good time to be starting to think about this conversation

in order to have time to really work on the safety reliability of these systems

and in order to have time for governance to really catch up

and for us to be engaging in a proactive way with the development of these systems

rather than reactively after they're out.

All the examples you've given are cases where they could pull the plug on it.

What is the particular fear about this sort of escaping that ability?

Well, I guess the first thing is you can pull the plug,

but sometimes it might already have caused harm.

There's also practical applications like people are using large models

to help them with cyber hacking competitions.

So you can easily imagine a bad actor using a system like this to better do cyber attacks.

And is it the fear of what bad actors,

how bad actors could use this technology

or do you fear that the technology itself could well in some way become evil

and after all it's something that for the first tool in human history

that has the ability to make decisions?

I would say that at present I'm worried about

use by bad actors and unintended consequences

and impact on things like jobs and inequality.

In the longer term there are concerns about

whether we could have systems that escape our control.

It's part of our remit to think about these issues.

They're not the immediate concern,

but a lot of the same steps that will allow us good governance

with the issues ahead of us are the kind of initial steps

I think we need to be taking for the longer term issues.

That was Sean O'Hagarty from Cambridge University.

A report by a British think tank says

Russia's security and intelligence services

have had far more success than its army

following the full scale invasion of Ukraine.

It says Russia's FSB counterintelligence service

has been able to swiftly dominate areas that it's occupied.

Frank Garmer has the details.

Russia's FSB Spieservice, the Successes to the KGB,

has reportedly been operating in Russian-controlled areas of Ukraine

with ruthless sufficiency in marked contrast

to the poor performance of the army.

In a new report published today,

the main author Jack Watling said

FSB officers would organise themselves in groups

seizing government records for each area

then downloading the computer hard drives.

These then revealed the addresses of anyone

connected to the Ukrainian state

who would then be arrested in house-to-house searches

and frequently tortured during interrogation.

Meanwhile, electronic warfare units

would cut off access to Ukrainian TV and radio

as well as the Internet,

giving the FSB and GRU military intelligence

near total dominance in occupied areas.

That was Frank Gardner.

The Ukrainian version of Ukraine

has indirectly led to a struggle for control

of the country's most revered Orthodox Christian site.

To date, clerics at the Kyiv Peshersk Lavra,

or Monastery of the Caves in Kyiv,

are being evicted by the Ukrainian government

amid concerns over their links to the Russian Orthodox Church,

from which it split recently.

I heard more from BBC monitoring Vitaliy Shevchenko.

The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is one of the two main

surviving ancient Christian sites in Ukraine.

It dates back to the 11th century.

It's this huge, beautiful sprawling complex in Kyiv.

And it's owned by the state.

And it was leased by the Ukrainian Orthodox Church for free.

And now the authorities are saying it's time to leave.

And why is that?

The two main Orthodox Churches in Ukraine.

And until recently,

it was part of the Russian Orthodox Church.

And it declared independence from Moscow

after the invasion of Ukraine started last year.

However, the Ukrainian authorities say that,

no, you're still part of the Russian Church.

You harbour Russian secret agents.

You spread pro-Russian ideas.

And the authorities in Ukraine,

they conducted a wave of searches

across numerous churches run by this particular church last year.

And they found Russian currency, Russian books.

So what happens next is less clear,

because the monks and the priests at the complex,

they are saying that they are not going to go at this moment in time.

There are lots of believers milling about in this large complex.

Priests are behaving defiantly.

They're talking to the media saying, no, we're not going.

But at the same time, there have been reports of them

taking their belongings out of this monastery.

And the Ukrainian authorities are equally vague

about what happens next.

They're saying they've got to leave the Bechersklavra.

But the secretary of the Ukrainian Security Council,

Vladimir Danilov, was just speaking to the media,

and he said they're not going to use force

to drag these people out of the monastery.

So let's see what happens next.

Well, Russia has been reacting.

Demitri Peskov, Vladimir Putin's press spokesman,

has said that the demand that the clerics leave the monastery

was illegitimate and unacceptable.

The Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

has reacted angrily to comments by President Joe Biden of the US,

who urged him to walk away from his controversial

judicial reform plans.

These include limiting the powers of Israel's Supreme Court.

The proposals have led to weeks of mass protests.

From Jerusalem, Tom Bateman reports.

Mr Biden said the Israeli leaders should abandon

his hugely controversial judicial reforms,

currently on hold for several weeks,

saying Israel cannot continue down this road.

Like many strong supporters of Israel, I'm very concerned.

And I'm concerned that they get this straight.

They cannot continue down this road.

And I've sort of made that clear.

Hopefully the Prime Minister will act in a way

that he's going to try to work out some genuine compromise.

But that remains to be seen.

The US has been dialing up the pressure on Mr Netanyahu,

fearing his plans in danger Israel's image as a democracy.

The Israeli PM clearly angered, took to Twitter late at night

in response, saying Israel was a sovereign country

which makes its own decisions,

not based on pressures from abroad,

including, he said, from the best of friends.

Mr Biden had said he wasn't interfering,

but seemed to brim with skepticism,

when he referred to Mr Netanyahu's apparent attempts now

to reach a compromise over the plans.

Tom Bateman.

Still to come.

Hello everybody, this is Arthur Briggs and his band Plains.

Are you ready, boys?

Yes!

Arthur Briggs,

who helped bring jazz to Europe,

who is living a lie.

The President of Taiwan, Tsai Ing-Wen,

has set off on a 10-day trip to Central America

to visit Guatemala and Belize.

They are two of the very few nations

that officially recognized Taiwan as an independent country.

But those destinations are the only reason

the trip's controversial.

It will also include two stopovers in New York on the way there

and Los Angeles on the way back.

And this has caused outrage in Beijing,

particularly the proposed meeting between the Taiwan President

and the US House Speaker, Kevin McCarthy.

I'll be getting more details from our Asia Pacific regional editor,

Michael Bristow.

In essence, as we've spoken about many times on this programme,

China believes that Taiwan is a part of its own territory

and it discourages any international contact

between foreign officials and the leaders of the island of Taiwan.

So even the visit to Guatemala and Belize is controversial

because China just simply doesn't want any country

to recognize Taiwan as a country.

But as you identified there, it's the trip to America,

which is causing most concern.

Of course, America, despite not having official ties with Taiwan,

has a lot of links with Taiwan.

Taiwan has an unofficial embassy there

and America has a representative office in Taiwan.

So it's these links, this link with America,

which is most problematic for China.

It just basically doesn't want to see the United States

give any support whatsoever to anybody in Taiwan.

And so that's why it's reacted, as it has done.

It says this trip by Tsai Ing-Wen is a provocation.

For her part, Tsai Ing-Wen, just before she left Taiwan,

said she won't yield to any kind of pressure

and will continue to pursue this policy,

which she has done throughout her presidency,

of trying to engage with the outside world,

despite what China has said.

Michael, I suppose this is just one of a series of stress tests

for the relationship between the US and China.

How serious is it?

I mean, as you mentioned there,

there are other issues between China and the United States,

trade, military, potential military conflict, lots of issues.

This is just one of them, but it is a major Flashpoint.

China is unswerving, really, in its determination

that one day Taiwan will unify with the mainland United States.

Particularly over recent years has shown increasing support for Taiwan.

So it is a real Flashpoint

and a potential starting point

for an even bigger development in their relationship.

And if you remember just last year, Nancy Pelosi,

who was then the House Speaker in the United States,

visited Taiwan and China launched a major military exercise

around Taiwan following that.

So it is not a small thing in China's eyes.

Das war Michael Bristow.

Just over two weeks ago,

Cyclone Freddy made landfall in Southeast Africa,

leaving a trail of devastation across the region.

In the worst hit country, Malawi,

over 500 people were killed

and over half a million people displaced.

Floods and mudslides swept away,

homes, roads and bridges.

Moses Konkuya, Malawi's Minister of Information

and Civic Education

and a former MP for Belanta,

one of the worst affected cities,

told us about the current situation.

Many people are still displaced.

We have over 700 camps now,

where we are holding these people,

providing shelter, providing food

and other forms of care.

So the situation is still dire

because most of the roads that were washed away,

over 40 Bridges were washed away.

Those places are still difficult to access

so that we can provide relief items to the people

that are in those areas.

There is a risk now of waterborne diseases

and other diseases due to the congestion

in the centers that these people are being kept.

So even the health sector is now overwhelmed as well.

The education sector remains affected

because most of the camps that have been created,

they are at schools.

Apart from schools being damaged,

over 500 schools being damaged physically,

the other schools are also being used as camps

for the people that have been displaced.

So with schools now due for reopening,

we have to make tough decisions

of moving people from those schools

to other temporary shelters like tents,

so that the children can return to school to die.

Those that have been completely displaced,

they have nowhere to go.

We have temporary shelters.

So we are receiving tents

and we are still pleading for more assistance in that regard

because the two have to be balanced.

School has to reopen

and we still have to take care of the people.

By talking of permanent structures,

that will definitely take time

and it's in the long-term plans.

That was Moses Kunkuyu.

Next to the controversy surrounding

America's largest bank, JPMorgan,

and the late sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein.

He was the biggest client who died in prison

whilst he was facing charges of running a sex trafficking ring.

Now the boss of JPMorgan, Jamie Diamond,

is to be interviewed under oath

about his bank's decision to retain Epstein as a client.

The bank denies any wrongdoing.

Monica Miller has been speaking

to Financial Times legal correspondent Joe Miller,

who broke the story.

All of this stems from two lawsuits

that were filed late last year,

one by an alleged Epstein victim,

goes by the pseudonym of Jane Doe,

and another by the U.S. Virgin Islands,

which is where Jeffrey Epstein had one of his homes.

And these suits are against JPMorgan.

They alleged that JPMorgan,

which banked Epstein for 15 years from 1998 to 2013,

benefited from human trafficking

because it ignored several internal warnings

about Epstein's behavior and his sex crimes.

But Jamie Diamond was just incidentally named in this suit

because his name came up in Discovery,

which is where lawyers for the plaintiff start

getting documents from the other side.

And there was one piece of internal communication,

which referenced a diamond review,

supposedly into whether to retain Epstein as a client.

The bank says Diamond has no recollection of

and there are no records of,

and things have escalated since then.

The bank had tried to make sure that Diamond

did not have to answer questions under oath,

but this is going to happen in May.

So he's no longer able to swerve direct questioning

about how much he knew and when.

How has it come to the point where the chief executive

of America's biggest bank is now being dragged into this case?

I think it's fair to say that,

and I can't speak for the plaintiff's lawyers,

but that the discovery in these cases,

which have been combined for pretrial purposes,

has unearthed new facts

that have surprised almost all of the parties involved.

It also unearthed an enormous trove of communications

between Jess Staley,

who used to be a very senior executive at J.P. Morgan.

You may know his name because he went on to become

CEO of Barclays.

He looked after the Epstein account for many years

and what was unearthed in discovery

were more than 1,200 e-mails and communications

between him and Epstein,

some of which allegedly contained pictures of women.

And these new facts were so stark

that it led J.P. Morgan to itself sue Staley

and try and make him carry the liability

if J.P. Morgan is successfully sued in these cases.

Staley himself is going to be deposed in April

and now Diamond will be deposed

after Staley is deposed by J.P. Morgan's lawyers.

All of this has essentially come about

because so many facts have been unveiled

in which the parties claim were previously unknown

and that it has led to these two lawsuits

which were filed with barely a whisper

at the end of last year becoming of a more high profile.

That was FT-Legal correspondent Joe Miller

and just to reiterate, the claims laid out

in the lawsuits have been denied by J.P. Morgan,

whose lawyers describe them as meritless.

Now, post-pandemic lockdown, tourist hotspots

are falling over themselves trying to lure people back,

but Amsterdam City Council wants to be more discerning.

It has just launched a campaign aimed at

discouraging young British people,

mostly men, from travelling there

for what it calls a messy night

in search of drugs, sex and alcohol.

The online initiative, which targets 18-35-year-old men in the UK,

will see discouraging adverts triggered

when search items like stag party, cheap hotel

or pub crawl in Amsterdam are typed in.

Claire Martins, a counsellor for Amsterdam,

says tourists will welcome if they have respect for the city.

Since last years, all the British hand parties

found Amsterdam as their place to party.

I mean, there are families living over there.

They see unfortunately Amsterdam as a theme park

and it's not livable anymore.

So we ask our mayor to find a solution

to make Amsterdam more livable

for the people who live actually in Amsterdam.

If you really would like to come for our shops,

our great museum, for example,

you are more than welcome.

It's a very specific target group from,

especially the UK and Italy,

who are only coming to Amsterdam

with the belief that we are a theme park.

The BBC's Anna Holligan is in Amsterdam.

Around a million British tourists travel

here to Schiffel Airport

and on to Amsterdam every year.

And the council now has a message for young British men.

And that is, stay away.

This is a digital discouragement campaign.

So if you're in the UK and you search for terms like

Stag weekend Amsterdam, cheap hotel Amsterdam,

pub crawl Amsterdam,

then these warning adverts will pop up.

And they show things like a young man

staggering in the street, being handcuffed by police,

detained, having his fingerprints and mug shots taken.

And the message is, if you're coming to Amsterdam,

which is notoriously, some would say,

Europe's most liberal party capital,

for a while time, then stay away.

Because you might just create the kinds of lifelong memories

that won't serve you well in the future.

So they're trying to deter the drunken, disorderly,

stoned kind of behavior

that residents have been complaining about for a long time.

They have told me in the past about British tourists

in the streets and the canals, being sick everywhere,

getting naked.

And that's the kind of behavior they want to get rid of.

But actually, I've been speaking to young Brits

arriving here at Skipple.

And many of them say, it's outrageous,

we're being stereotyped in this way.

This is discrimination.

And in fact, that kind of sentiment is echoed

among some coffee shop, cannabis cafe owners I've spoken to.

One told me, they might come for the weed,

but they stay for the Van Gogh.

And some of the families who live along

the beautiful canal network have told me in the past

that it's not necessarily the young British men

who are causing the problems.

It's overtourism in general.

It's the sheer number.

So this is part of Amsterdam City Council's effort

to try to rebrand the capital's rather raunchy reputation,

partly created by the Cannabis Cafes

and the Red Light District.

And they hope that if it's successful in the UK,

it will be ruled out across other EU capitals.

And here are the Netherlands too.

That was Anna Holligan.

It's a name not widely known, Arthur Bricks.

Unless you're a fan of early jazz, of course.

He was a trumpeter who played a central role

in bringing jazz to Europe in the 1920s and 1930s.

What no one knew at the time is that he was not,

as he claimed to be, an American,

but a son of the British Empire,

having been born in Grenada in the West Indies

at the turn of the century.

Arthur Bricks lived most of his life in Paris.

Our correspondent there, Hugh Scofield,

has been unearthing the adventures

and the secrets of a forgotten British Caribbean great.

Hello everybody, this is Arthur Bricks and his band Plain.

Are you ready, boys?

Yes!

From the late 1920s, Arthur Bricks

was the best known name in Europe

performing the new Hot Music.

Critics called him Europe's answer to Louis Armstrong.

Audiences danced to his cornet in Berlin, Vienna,

Paris and the Riviera.

He was absolutely synonymous with jazz throughout Europe.

He's tilling the soil.

He's traveling to all these places

introducing people who had no concept

of this sort of syncopation yet.

Biographer Travis Atria.

Researchers into Arthur Bricks' life and music

have won priceless asset,

a long archive interview he made in 1982

for Rutgers University in the US.

They had brass, you had trombones, you had trumpets.

Over the course of seven hours of tapes,

never before broadcast,

Bricks recounts his adventures

traveling around Europe.

In the 30s Arthur Bricks settled in Paris

where he helped set up the famous Hot Club

and played with greats like Django Reinhardt

and Stefan Grappelli.

But then came war and Bricks was interned

by the Nazis outside Paris.

Here there's another great scene.

Bricks, who leads a camp orchestra,

conducts a concert of Beethoven

which is attended by Nazi top brass.

Afterwards, he's approached by the commanding officer

of the German army in France,

Otto von Stülpnägel.

Travis Atria takes up the tale.

Stülpnägel says to him in English,

I never thought it was possible.

Meaning, I never thought that a black man

could play Beethoven.

Bricks says to him in perfect German

because Bricks has learned how to speak German

by this point through all his travels.

He says to him in German, there's a lot that you don't know.

And to me, that moment

is the absolute climax

of Bricks' life.

The guts it took.

Arthur Bricks spanned the century.

He died in 1991.

Today, living in the same flat in Montmartre,

is his daughter Barbara,

born in 1960, after her father gave up playing

and started a new family life.

My mum was very young, worked in the office.

And my dad took care of me.

And he only worked two days a week

in a musical school.

That must have given you a very special relationship with him.

Of course, it was.

It was a special relationship.

Arthur Bricks rarely spoke to Barbara

about his past fame as a jazz man,

nor did he like to talk about

the great secret of his early life.

Here he is again from the archive.

But that statement was simply not true.

Arthur Bricks was born in Grenada.

He came to Harlem, New York

only as a teenager.

Throughout his working life in the 20s and 30s,

he travelled on a British passport.

But to the end, he insisted he was American.

Jazz Historian Rainer Lotz.

He told the same story to every interviewer

and made up his early life.

He invented persons.

He invented people that he claimed to have known.

Very strange.

Arthur Bricks,

the only British subject known

to have taken part in the creation,

growth and spread of jazz.

That report was by Hugh Schofield.

And that's all from us for now,

but there will be a new edition

of the Global News Podcast later on.

If you want a comment on this podcast

or the topics that we've covered in it,

you can send us an email.

The address is GlobalPodcast

at bbc.co.uk.

You can also find us on Twitter

at Global News Pod.

This edition was mixed by Ethan Connolly Forster

and the producer was Rachel Wright.

The editor is Karen Martin.

So, until next time, goodbye.

Machine-generated transcript that may contain inaccuracies.