Credits: Quang Nguyen Vinh on Pexels

By: Alberto Quintavalla, Irakli Samkharadze and Franz Kienzl

Opening remarks

We need more reliable sources of energy, and we need to distribute the energy that we do have more fairly. Anyone who has given these matters even a little serious thought has also thought of recognising energy as a human right: our biological survival depends on it, as do all of our other, more elevated pursuits. Currently, there is no formal recognition of a right to energy in international and regional human rights instruments. The explicit acknowledgment of energy as a fundamental human right has yet to be codified in legal frameworks at these levels. . Concepts like ‘sustainable development’ and ‘energy justice’ are now on everyone’s lips, but popular clamour has failed to spark meaningful legal reform. Here, we explain why those who fight for the formal recognition of a human right to energy should try to learn from water activists.

In 2023 and 2024, the EU reported considerable progress on climate action. EU greenhouse gas emissions fell by 8.3% in 2023, and the production and consumption of renewable energy both grew. The European Union Member States are advancing towards their climate and energy objectives for 2030 and 2050. However, in 2023, over 10% of the residents of the EU population could not keep their homes warm, an increase of 1.3% from 2022. The escalating energy crisis and rising inflation mean that this number is practically assured to grow in the coming years: energy will become less accessible to more people.

Many international treaties recognise energy as a basic need. According to the highly influential Brundtland Report, ‘energy is necessary for daily survival’ because it ‘provides essential services for human life – heat for warmth, cooking, and manufacturing, or power for transport and mechanical work’. Over the last decade, many have called for the recognition of a human right to energy. These calls are for a revolution of a very technical legal nature, but they flow naturally from two more general ideas that have recently taken hold of our collective imagination: sustainable development and energy justice. Sustainable development is about social equity. That is, about preventing energy poverty, and about economics. As a term of art, it sees widespread use in political discourse, as well as in international legal instruments. Energy justice is a term of relatively recent coinage, and it originated in academic discourse. It emphasises that human rights should play a crucial role in how we allocate rights to the use of energy. The two ideas are complementary: sustainable development has to do with energy needs, while energy justice is about legal rights.

Despite their obvious appeal and the unceasing efforts of many international communities of activists, so far, neither concept has gained sufficient traction to guarantee the formal recognition of a right to energy within international human rights law. Energy remains peripheral to the international human rights framework – you may, if you like, read the thousands of documents that constitute it, and you will not find a single one that deals expressly with energy. At best, you will find a few scattered references, all in texts that claim to be animated by supposedly loftier concerns.

Lessons from the right to water

Of course, nothing is new under the sun; so it is with the right to energy, too. For a long time, scholars, activists, and politicians campaigned for the formal recognition of a right to water. Eventually, they made it. Being a ‘positive’ socio-economic entitlement rather than a ‘negative’ liberal one, that right, like the right to energy, was not to be found in any major human rights treaties. At the same time, the right to water is obviously key to the realisation of many of the rights that we find in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

As with the right to energy, the campaign for a right to water revolved around arguments from justice and the basic idea that people who can neither sate their thirst nor wash their trousers gain very little from freedom of the press and inviolable property. However, the two campaigns are not exactly identical. The advocates of a right to energy have so far limited themselves to stressing the connection between their cause and the satisfaction of other basic needs. The advocates of a right to water, once they were sufficiently experienced, learned to always link their concerns to the idea of human dignity. Human dignity matters more than anything to lawyers because it is at the core of all other rights: we have rights frameworks so that we can live dignified lives (compare, for example, the Preambles to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights or the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. Both assert that human rights “derive from the inherent dignity of the human person.”). Energy activists should follow this example. If they do not seize on the idea of dignity, then their arguments will forever be derivative, and those who wield power will always take their aims to be secondary, and a formal right to energy will never amount to anything more than coffeehouse chat.

Concluding remarks

Let us now summarise. Contemporary right-to-energy discourse emphasises the link between energy, basic needs, and other socio-economic rights. If we are right, then those who hold that cause dear should try to tie their pleas more tightly to the idea of human dignity. We have history on our side: the right to water was eventually recognised in human rights law because its advocates made themselves into advocates of dignity, too. We do not, of course, mean to say that our discursive strategy will succeed immediately or simply. We will have to be patient, we will have to suffer long negotiations, and we will have to make many concessions to the demands of states, of international organisations, and of other stakeholders – the race will not be to the swift, but nor will the battle be to the strong.

This blogpost is cross-posted from the Leuven Blog for Public Law:, and is based on a paper that was published in Journal of Human Rights and the Environment, under the title ‘The human right to energy: drawing lessons from the development of the human right to water’. 

Bio:

Alberto Quintavalla, is Associate Professor at Erasmus School of Law and co-Director of the Erasmus Center of Law and Digitalization. His research focus is at the intersection of human rights, technology and the environment. He has recently been the co-editor of the volume Human Rights and Artificial Intelligence (Oxford University Press) (quintavalla@law.eur.nl).

Irakli Samkharadze is a Professor in Public Law, the Head of European Integration Research Centre at Georgian National University and a lecturer at Ivane Javakhishvili Tbilisi State University and Ilia State University (Georgia). He currently serves as an Energy Advisor at the German consulting firm OMNIA GmbH, where he supports partners in designing and implementing reforms for sustainable, competitive, and transparent energy markets (irakli.samkharadze@omnia-energy.eu).

Franz Kienzl is Legal Counsel at the Austrian Power Grid AG. He has worked at a major Austrian law firm specializing in energy law and at both a natural gas transmission system operator and an electricity transmission system operator. He obtained degrees in law at the University of Vienna (Magister) and at the University of Groningen (LL.M in energy law). (franz@kienzl.org)