(iPoster) Using Human Rights Litigation to Address Climate Change

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Abstract

In the last decade, there has been a significant increase in efforts to address climate change as a human rights issue through international human rights mechanisms, constitutional protections,
and domestic litigation (Setzer and Higham 2025). Given the complex issues involved in climate policy, it would be better to work through the democratic political process, but unfortunately, governments have been far too slow to act. As a result, people have turned to the courts and international human rights bodies to hold governments and fossil fuel companies accountable and to pressure them to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. I will consider the prospects and limitations of human rights-based climate litigation by analyzing legal cases against governments before national courts, the European Court of Human Rights, and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.

Political and legal theorists have provided different accounts to explain how climate change violates human rights. Henry Shue and Simon Caney argue that climate change threatens people’s long-established rights to life, health, and subsistence. Other theorists argue that we ought to legally recognize and protect a distinct right to a healthy and sustainable climate or environment (Steven Vanderheiden, Tim Hayward, Bridget Lewis). Many countries, a few states within the United States, and the United Nations General Assembly have already recognized this right. I argue that while it is best to develop explicit legal protection for a right to a healthy and sustainable environment, in the absence of this, it is important for courts to consider whether a government’s failure to sufficiently address climate change may violate other legally protected rights.

The two most promising cases in the United States are Held v. Montana (2023) and Navahine v. Hawaii Department of Transportation (filed in 2022). In both cases, the fact that the right to a clean environment was included in the state’s constitution contributed significantly to the positive outcome. Other cases have faced a number of legal obstacles, including challenges to the justiciability of the cause of action and the breadth of the remedy sought (Youth v. Gov).

I will consider how some of these challenges were addressed by courts in other legal systems. For example, in State of the Netherlands v Urgenda (2019), the Dutch Supreme Court upheld the Court of Appeal’s ruling that the state’s obligation to protect the right to life applied to environmental threats that might only occur in the long term. The Court determined that the government’s pledge to reduce emissions by 17% was insufficient to meet the state’s fair contribution toward the United Nations’ goal of keeping global temperature increases within 2 degrees celsius of pre-industrial conditions and it ordered the state to limit GHG emissions to 25% below 1990 levels by 2020. In Future Generations v. Ministry of the Environment and Others (2018), the Supreme Court of Colombia stated that "the fundamental rights of life, health, minimum subsistence, freedom, and human dignity are substantially linked and determined by the environment and the ecosystem." It recognized that without a healthy environment, the Colombian people would not be able to survive or protect the rights of children and future generations. The Court ordered the government to formulate and implement action plans to address deforestation in the Amazon and to reduce GHG emissions. In both cases, policy decisions about how to reduce GHG emissions or deforestation were left to the government, but the courts were able to require immediate action.

While there are limitations with using a human rights legal framework to effectively address climate change, human rights-based litigation can be an important tool to hold governments accountable. It can also be used to motivate broader action particularly since the language of human rights is empowering and it has normative weight.

Sources
Caney, Simon. 2009. “Human Rights, Responsibilities and Climate Change.” In Global Basic Rights, ed. Charles Beitz and Robert Goodin, 227–47, Oxford University Press.
Hayward, Tim. 2005 Constitutional Environmental Rights. Oxford University Press.
Lewis, Bridget. 2018. Environmental Human Rights and Climate Change. Springer.
Setzer, Joana and Higham, Catherine. 2025. Global Trends in Climate Change Litigation:2025 Snapshot. London: Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science.
Shue, Henry. 2017. “Human Rights, Climate Change, and the Trillionth Ton.” In Environmental Rights, ed. Steve Vanderheiden, 191-213. Routledge.
Vanderheiden, Steve. 2008. Atmospheric Justice: A Political Theory of Climate Change. Oxford University Press.

Author

• Sandra Raponi, Merrimack College