Fuel poverty − the inability to afford adequate warmth in the home − is a widespread problem across the UK. Cold, damp homes are detrimental to human health and contribute to thousands of 'excess winter deaths' every year. This article analyses fuel poverty from a human rights perspective -asking whether it engages human rights protections. It first discusses the definition, scale and health impacts of the problem. Second, it explores the relationship between fuel poverty and the rights contained within the European Convention on Human Rights, the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights and the European Social Charter. It concludes that fuel poverty readily engages rights to adequate housing, food and health and certain civil and political rights in extreme circumstances. It discusses the legal implications of these findings for fuel poverty policy, arguing for a 'human rights approach' to tackling the problem. These conclusions focus on the particularly drastic fuel poverty situation in the UK, but can also be applied globally to the various nations where citizens suffer similar problems and extend to the wider debate on the relationship between poverty and human rights.
In March 2012 the Scottish Parliament unanimously passed a motion ‘strongly endors[ing] the opportunity for Scotland to champion climate justice’. To date, discussions around climate justice within Scottish policy have largely focussed on international dimensions. Questions remain as to what climate justice means at home in Scotland. This article aims to engage with such questions. It begins with an overview of the theoretical underpinnings of climate justice discourses and discusses the various ways that climate justice is framed and understood. We then introduce a categorisation of three broad approaches to climate justice which are being seen globally: conceptual, pragmatic and transformative. We discuss how climate justice has been pursued in practice to illustrate the different forms that can occur under a climate justice banner, and the implications of different understandings of the concept. Using the human rights based approach to climate change as an illustration of the malleable nature of climate justice, we categorise and critique the dominant approach to climate justice used in Scotland. We find that climate justice is a label which can be applied to a range of practices, with differing results. It is hoped that this article encourages further reflection and debate on the particular flavour of climate justice which has been chosen in Scotland and its implications.
In Scotland, there has been an increasing trend for the costs associated with the administration of civil justice to be met by the users of the court system. Such a policy can broadly be referred to as “full cost recovery”. A recent Scottish Government consultation on court fees uncritically continued with this overall approach, but various consultees nevertheless took the opportunity to critique full cost recovery in the context of that consultation and more generally. This article takes up that analysis, in a manner that should also be of interest to non-Scottish readers who may be contending with a similar challenge in another jurisdiction, by critiquing full cost recovery in principle and by offering potential routes by which its implementation might be challenged. It begins by explaining what full cost recovery actually is and investigating its origins, before interrogating some of the assumptions or acquiescence that seems to have developed around the issue and discussing the potential for litigation against court fees in Scotland.
This comment discusses the implementation of a 2011 manifesto commitment by the Scottish National Party to publish an options paper on the creation of an environmental court in Scotland. It critiques the resulting 2016 ‘Developments in environmental justice in Scotland’ consultation and subsequent 2017 ‘analysis and response’ – which decided against creating an environmental court. In particular, it examines the consultation with regard to the access to environmental justice requirements of the Aarhus Convention. Despite repeated findings by the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee and the Meeting of the Parties that the Scottish legal system is non-compliant with Articles 9(4) and 9(5), the consultation documents mention Scotland’s ‘ongoing compliance’ and dismiss the Compliance Committee as a non-judicial body. The comment argues that the Scottish Government failed to fulfil its manifesto commitment and gave little recognition to the structural problems in accessing environmental justice in Scotland.
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