Symposium: African Perspectives on International Climate Change Law / Lunch Discussion: The Role of Courts in ... - Human Rights @ Harvard Law

Climate Justice Series at HLS: Day 2 - Harvard Law School | Human Rights Program

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Day 2 of the Series of Climate Justice Events at HLS will consist of the all-day academic symposium “African Perspectives on International Climate Change Law” and the lunch event “The Role of Courts in Advancing the Right to a Healthy Environment: Lessons from Latin America”. Panel sessions at the symposium will cover topics such as “Participation of African States in Shaping International Law” or “Climate Change and Loss and Damage”. The lunch event will bring together leading judges and supreme court justices from Brazil, Argentina and Mexico to provide an overview of the judicialization of a right to a healthy environment in Latin America.

Symposium: African Perspectives on International Climate Change Law

There has been a significant rise in climate change litigation over the last decade. The recent advisory opinion proceedings before the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), as well as the request for an advisory opinion before the Inter-American Court of Human Rights are judicial proceedings with potentially far-reaching implications towards the obligations of states in connection with climate change.

Although African states have signalized a willingness to play a significant role in global climate matters, it is far from clear whether or how much they will participate in shaping international climate change law. This is despite the fact that Africa has contributed only to a very limited extent to the climate crisis, with just about 4% percent of global cumulative emissions, and stands out disproportionately as one of the most vulnerable regions in the world. This symposium will foreground African perspectives on international climate change law which, due to pre-existing power structures, are more likely to be overlooked in global norm-making processes.

Lunch Discussion: The Role of Courts in Advancing the Right to a Healthy Environment: Lessons from Latin America

Latin America has been at the forefront of judicialization of a right to a healthy environment. Courts in different countries have curbed burning and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, as well as the expansion of wind farms in Mexico; they have ordered the clean-up of river basins in Argentina and ordered the protection of important ecosystems in Colombia. Some high courts have embraced ‘rights of nature’ and have fashioned innovative structural remedies, which have included the creation of new institutions. Nonetheless, there is a very mixed record on implementation of the judgments and a complex political economy around creating public policies that advance the effective enjoyment of rights to a healthy environment in a region wracked by economic inequality and the outsized power of extractive and other commercial interests. Leading judges and supreme court justices from Brazil, Argentina and Mexico will discuss the evolution of this jurisprudence in their respective countries, and a panel discussion will follow that examines challenges as well as successes.