This post is part of the Yale Journal of International Law Volume 37, Issue 2 symposium. Other posts in this series can be found in the related posts below.
[Siobhan McInerney-Lankford is a human rights lawyer and senior policy officer at the World Bank.]
Human rights law can contribute to understanding climate change, particularly in terms of the social and human impacts of climate change. In
Avoiding Adaptation Apartheid, Hall and Weiss consider how climate change affects the enjoyment of human rights and employ a legal frame of reference to address the complementary question of how human rights law can inform responses to climate change. By distinguishing how human rights might inform mitigation policies from how they could influence adaptation policies and by focusing on the latter, they get beyond the challenges of establishing causation (due to the aggregate causes and disparate impacts of climate change) and the absence of an established legal basis for what John Knox calls “diagonal environmental rights” between individuals or groups in one country against the government of another country. Instead they highlight the relevance of the ‘vertical dimension’ of human rights law as it governs the relationship between states and their citizens, irrespective of where responsibility for increased emissions should be assigned.
A strength of this approach is its emphasis on existing legal obligations and the enhanced accountability contributed by human rights, since rights imply correlative duties or obligations. A number of additional perspectives are worth highlighting which relate to human rights as the subjects of public international law. As a formal legal matter, it is worth considering how one argues effectively for the applicability of human rights obligations to mitigation responses governed by international environmental law, given the increasingly fragmented nature of international law. One might invoke the importance of international policy coherence to argue for the general relevance of human rights obligations to climate change policy. One might further argue for interpretative reliance on human rights obligations in implementing environmental law obligations where both are binding on a particular government, as for instance where the State were party to both the ICESCR and the UNFCCC. Support could be drawn for this on the principle of systemic integration to argue that human rights law obligations are part of the relevant rules of international law applicable in relations between the parties, within the meaning Article 31 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. This normative interplay could be characterized negatively or positively. In negative terms it could be cast as a responsibility to ensure that the interpretation of norms related to climate change not undermine the fulfillment of human rights obligations. From a more positive perspective, human rights obligations could be drawn upon to inform the design and implementation of goals set forth in climate agreements.
