29 April, 1 May 2024
Welcome to the fourteenth session of the course on International Human Rights. Today we are going to look at a new and evolving area for human rights and one in which the issues are not at all clear: climate change.
All of the countries on the planet accept that human-caused climate change is happening and that if it is not addressed, the human race is in peril. The scale of the problem is clearly growing, as successive assessments by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show. The current consensus among governments is found in the Paris Agreement that was negotiated in the context of the UN Framework Agreement on Climate Change in 2016. This set out a broad series of steps that States have agreed to take to address the problem. In the preliminary paragraphs of the Agreement, it is stated that States party are
Acknowledging that climate change is a common concern of humankind, Parties should, when taking action to address climate change, respect, promote and consider their respective obligations on human rights, the right to health, the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities, migrants, children, persons with disabilities and people in vulnerable situations and the right to development, as well as gender equality, empowerment of women and intergenerational equity
This, of course, is not specific to climate change. The problem is that solving climate change involves governments, the private sector and individual human behavior. A reasonable questions is: if a State decides not to do anything about climate change (including suppressing information about it) is that a violation of its citizens' human rights? And if so, which elements of the Universal Declaration and the eight conventions are involved?
Some NGOs, like the Global Network for the Study of Human Rights and the Environment (GNHRE), are beginning to explore this. An example is a blog done by Dr. Sam Adelman on 18 April 2018 on Climate Change Law, Litigation and Governance that reports on a workshop at the University of Warwick in February 2018. This discussed how courts could be used to defend human rights. The network also publishes the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, which has editions since 2010. One issue in September 2015 dealt with the legitimacy of human rights courts in environmental disputes. The editorial for that issue describes the status of this in 2015, mostly in regional human rights courts.
We will discuss the issue of human rights and climate change in detail in the session.