Credits: Image by Freepik
By David Patterson
Good news: Following the NNHRR workshop (report now online) ‘Future-proofing your human rights research: climate change as a cross-cutting theme for human rights research’ the proposal for the NNHRR working group on human rights and the climate crisis has been approved. Details of the working group will appear on the NNHRR website shortly.
In the coming weeks, Human Rights Here will post contributions from working group members on human rights and the climate crisis. The diversity of these perspectives demonstrates how climate change and related environmental degradation affect all aspects of human health and life.
The scale of the crisis is daunting. How did we get here? How are we going to get through this? In this post I offer some reflections on the urgency of (re)asserting and (re)affirming the centrality of human rights ethics and law in responding to the climate crisis. My experience and examples relate to the right to health, however the climate crisis threatens the enjoyment of every human right, as all human rights are universal, indivisible, interdependent and interrelated.
As we all know, in response to the horrors of the First and Second World Wars and the Holocaust, in 1945 the member states of the newly formed United Nations Organization (UN) included ‘promoting and encouraging respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms’ in the purposes and principles of the UN Charter. In 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), which provided the ethical foundations for subsequent UN and regional human rights treaties (recall the Toogdag 2023 discussion on the UDHR 75th anniversary!).
Many NNHRR members and other readers may have studied law at university or college. Was human rights law a compulsory subject? How is this relevant to climate change? You might think that the UN Charter, the UDHR and human rights treaties would be foundational texts for all students of law. Not the case. If taught at all, human rights law is often taught as an elective subject, like trade law or intellectual property law. Without formal instruction in human rights law, generations of law graduates have been equipped with legal skills and qualifications to further narrow interests of governments and private sector enterprises. Often irreversibly damaging our climate and environment, now and for future generations. I would like to think that universal human rights education would have tempered their rapacity.
No discipline can claim sole ownership of the concept of human rights. For example, in the context of the right to health, a recent literature review of the term ‘human rights-based approach to health’ found that more than 40% of the articles using this or a related phrase had no author with a legal qualification. This is heartening as it indicates interest outside the legal discipline in the contribution of human rights to health. However, more than 30 per cent of these articles contained obvious legal errors or omitted relevant legal frameworks or guidance. For many of these authors, human rights remains an ethical concept without legal foundations or obligations. In the context of health, at least, the human rights community has clearly failed to engage adequately with colleagues in medicine, public health, and related disciplines.
For its part, the public health community has increasingly recognised the role of the law (and to some extent human rights law) in public health. For example, the Association of Schools of Public Health in the European Region (ASPHER)’s European Competencies Framework for Public Health Workforce notes in section 3.1 that a competent public health practitioner ‘[k]nows, understands and applies the relevant, international, European and national laws or regulations to maximise opportunities to protect and promote health and wellbeing.’ ASPHER’s Climate and Health Competencies for Public Health Professionals in Europe notes in section 1.10 that a competent public health professional ‘[k]nows the ethical, professional and legal obligations relevant to climate and health.’ Further, ASPHER suggests that all public health graduates be able to ‘[...] form partnerships and alliances in multidisciplinary settings with experts in these areas.’ In the context of climate change this includes, for example, collaboration between public health and legal experts on climate litigation. It is hugely encouraging that the 2024 ASPHER European Climate and Health Responders Course includes a component on health and climate litigation which references climate cases grounded in human rights obligations.
I hope the blog posts from the members of the working group on human rights and the climate crisis inspire you to reflect on and share how the climate crisis impacts all human rights, and equally how human rights provides an ethical and legal framework for responding to the climate crisis.
Editor's Note: Starting tomorrow, the blog series contributions will be published every 2 days.
Bio:
David Patterson is a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Law at Groningen University. His research addresses the health impacts of climate change through a human rights lens. He is a member of the Groningen Centre for Health Law and the steering committee of the Law and Public Health section (EUPHA-LAW) of the European Public Health Association.