The planet demands justice

As the consequences of the climate crisis intensify around the world, scientists, lawyers and social movements they seek solutions under the pressure of time in new spaces: one of these is justice, represented here by both national and international courts. Colombian César Rodríguez Garavito, professor at New York University School of Law and director of the same university’s Center for Human Rights and Global Justice, is the editor of Litigation on the climate emergency (Siglo XXI), a corpus of essays that review the fate of such strategies.

One axis that links these trials, presented before the judicial bodies, national, regional, world and United Nations human rights courts, is the idea that the climate crisis threatens people’s right to life, health and integrity.

“Future generations could inherit an uninhabitable planet if carbon emissions are not drastically and urgently reduced, in accordance with the recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate,” he warns the academician in an interview with No..

Therefore, a detail of the litigation across the planet and the particularities of the Latin American and Argentine cases is presented as necessary to exploit this tool.

– Affecting the increase in case submissions from 2015 to today, what is the reason for this growth?

–The proliferation of climate change and human rights litigation around the world is due to three factors. First: in the 2015 Paris Agreement, governments pledged to achieve concrete goals to avoid worst-case scenarios of climate change, which would have been triggered if we increased global warming by 1.5 °. Faced with the failure and reluctance of governments, the contenders have invoked these goals in court to enforce them.. Second, the scientists’ conclusions and recommendations have become more precise and urgent. Activists and courts have used scientific evidence to force the most polluting governments and companies to reduce emissions of gases that warm the planet. And thirdly, social organizations have understood and effectively communicated the climate emergency as the greatest existential challenge to human rights and life on the planet.

– The book says that today environmental litigation, based on human rights, has spread all over the world, such as coal mining in Europe, South Africa and Australia, against fossil fuels in the Philippines, oil exploration in the Philippines. ‘Norwegian Arctic, the cattle ranch driving deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, could you explain what common characteristics they share?

–Most causes seek to force states and companies to reduce their emissions with the urgency and scale required by science and international agreements. Specific requests and court orders depend on the context. In Europe, the most successful cases have required governments such as Germany and the Netherlands, and companies such as Shell, to accelerate the transition to clean energy. In Latin America, the most important litigation in countries like Brazil and Colombia has been aimed at controlling deforestation in essential ecosystems such as the Amazon.

– Has Greta Thunberg’s request before the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child been answered?

-The petition was presented by Greta Thunberg and fifteen other young activists against five states: Germany, Argentina, Brazil, France and Turkey. The signatories argued that these countries – being among the largest carbon emitters among those that have ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child – jeopardize the rights of generations who will suffer the worst effects of climate change. Although the Committee, in its 2021 response, young signatories recognized as victims and affirmed that states are responsible not only for the damage suffered by their young citizens, but also by young people from other countries, finally rejected the petition because it concluded that the young people had not exhausted the judicial remedies with which they have in their countries.

– I return to a question in the book: What types of litigation can contribute to achieving the scale and urgency that, according to science, are necessary?

– Disputes that are framed in a wider citizen mobilization, in which legal actions are part of a strategy that also includes information campaigns, direct actions in the streets and national and international lobbies, have better prospects. The most successful cases are those involving not only lawyers and judges, but also youth organizations, scientists, environmentalists, human rights activists, indigenous peoples and other social sectors.

Why was the Urgenda case so important?

–Urgenda was the first case that successfully framed climate change as a source of human rights violations. And also was the first to obtain an injunction from a supreme court (that of the Netherlands) which obliges a government to increase and accelerate its contribution to the fight against climate change. That is why it was an important precedent for many of the subsequent cases.

-What is the state of the litigation situation in Argentina in particular and in Latin America in general?

–Latin America is one of the most active regions in this field. Almost 20% of the global litigation was brought before the courts of Latin America. Some of the most notable precedents are the ruling by the Supreme Court of Colombia in 2018 which ordered the government to achieve the promised goal of reducing deforestation in the Amazon, and the ruling by the Supreme Court of Mexico in 2019, which placed a limit on ethanol for environmental and climatic reasons. In Brazil, the Supreme Court has several fundamental lawsuits in its hands against the disastrous performance of the government of Jair Bolsonaro in matters of environmental protection and climate change. Y in Argentina, our database at New York University shows that there are eight pending lawsuitsthe majority aimed to question the construction of polluting thermoelectric plants due to the aggravation of global warming and its impact on human rights.

– What trials in Argentina and around the world have allowed justice to influence to combat climate change?

-As Argentine lawsuits have not been decided by the courts, their influence in the fight against climate change remains to be seen. In addition to the cases mentioned, in other parts of the world three decisions should be highlighted: the ruling of the German Constitutional Court which in 2021 obliged the government to specify the policies it will implement to achieve its climate objectives for the year 2050; the decision of a district court in The Hague, which forces the multinational Shell to transform its business model to reduce the emissions it produces; and the recent decision by the Philippine Human Rights Commission, which states that several major global oil companies have violated the human rights of victims of typhoons and other extreme weather events, due not only to their mining activities, but also to disinformation and cover-up campaigns. of the evidence they had on the catastrophic impact of these activities on the planet’s climate.

ESSENTIAL

Cesare Rodriguez Garavito
Colombia. Jurist.

He is a visiting professor at New York University. He co-founder of Dejusticia and founding director of the Global Justice and Human Rights Program at the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). He is a lawyer from this university and has a PhD. in Sociology from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He has been visiting professor at the universities of Stanford, Brown, Melbourne, European University Institute, Getulio Vargas (Brazil), Pretoria (South Africa) and Central Europe (Hungary). He is the author of numerous books and articles: How to think about human rights inequality? (edited by, 2018), For a healthy environment that promotes human rights in the global South (edited by, 2017), Extractivism against human rights (edited by, 2016), Judgment of exclusion (in collaboration with Diana Rodríguez Franco, 2015) e Law in Latin America (edited by, 2011).

Litigation on the climate emergency
Cesar Rodriguez-Garavito
21st century
464 pages