"Climate change poses an existential threat to human rights", 16 Jul 2015

Over the last ten years or so, human rights groups, activists and scholars have plunged into climate change politics. We know a lot about the human rights dimensions of climate change today, but it is still unclear what, if anything, human rights law has to offer...There may be a residual role for strategic litigation where climate victims are found in high-emitting countries with strong judicial systems...[However,] the overwhelming majority of climate victims will be...in countries that have contributed relatively little to the problem. Courts there will not have authority to source compensation from where it's properly owed, much less to require major carbon emitters to desist...

Human rights law has apparently little or nothing to say about the key problem facing climate change action: how are we going to bring carbon emissions down, dramatically and urgently, at a rate that will take us off the 4° path? States are not going to adopt binding emission reduction targets, potentially tanking their economies, merely in order to satisfy their peers at the UPR, scholars on the CESC or the various Special Procedures...In order to keep 80% or more of this oil in the ground, as we must, concrete drastic action is needed: banning it; phasing it out; putting a moratorium on exploration; fining overproduction; criminalizing it...Of course we might recast all these concerns too as human rights issues—but, if we want actual change, rather than, say, social media applause, why would we? The irony is that, faced with an extraordinary, indeed existential, threat to the fulfilment of supposed “internationally protected” human rights, on a global scale, human rights law and lawyers, indeed the whole human rights movement, has little useful to say and no obvious role to play...[Refers to BP, Eni, Shell]