The adoption of the Paris Agreement has prompted a flurry of climate change litigation, both to redress the impacts of climate change and to put pressure on state and non-state actors to adopt more ambitious action to tackle climate change. The use of human rights law as a gap-filler to provide remedies where other areas of the law do not is not new, especially in the environmental context. It is therefore not a surprise that human rights arguments are increasingly being made, and human rights remedies increasingly being sought, in climate change litigation. While relatively few cases have been argued on human rights grounds so far, the trend is continuing and accelerating, with some striking results. This article takes stock of human rights arguments made in climate change litigation to date to gauge what they reveal about the evolving relationship between human rights and climate change law—and about possible future developments.
This article maps climate litigation developments in Latin America and their human rights and constitutional rights implications. As in other regions of the Global South, groups and individuals in Latin America have engaged in litigation to counter environmental harms threatening or violating the enjoyment of their human rights. Climate change, either as a primary or as a secondary concern, is slowly becoming a key focus of this form of strategic human rights-based litigation. Despite the gradual increase of the ‘Latin American docket’ of climate litigation cases, very few academic accounts have explored its legal dimensions or its contextual underpinnings. This article addresses this lacuna by identifying and examining the constitutional opportunities for and constraints upon adjudicating climate-related cases through human rights law, and also problematizes the development of climate litigation in Latin America by drawing attention to the influence of extractivist political and economic interests. The categories used for analysis stem from the literature on climate litigation in the Global South, case law and interviews with Latin-American litigants. The article concludes by stressing that this type of climate litigation is increasing and has led to several favourable verdicts, but caution is warranted as some political economy elements might hinder the development of such litigation, its inclusivity and long-term effectiveness.
Multinational Corporations are present in virtually every corner of the world, generating not only economic growth but foremost human rights abuses linked to environmental degradation. In view of this, the United Nations Human Rights Council mandated an intergovernmental working group to draft a binding instrument on business and human rights, potentially drawing obligations for private commercial entities with a transnational character. In that context, an analysis of the ongoing negotiations will be conducted to identify and discuss the environmental law dimensions embedded therein. A dialogue between the content of the travaux préparatoires of the treaty's drafting process-including the official reports of the three sessions and other relevant documents-and the evolution of international corporate environmental accountability, will yield some possible pathways for environmental protection linked to human rights. Furthermore, special importance will be given to discussions with respect to the obligations of corporations and its implications for the protection of the environment. Some findings will show that the current state of negotiations falls short in reflecting environmental dimensions from a legal perspective, although the tools that might be developed in the process could be moulded as to integrate them in forthcoming negotiations.
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