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Human rights approaches to planetary crises: From climate change to plastic pollution
No full textThis book analyses over twenty years of rights-based litigation in the areas of climate change and plastic pollution in order to assess the value of rights in confronting and overcoming planetary crises.
We live in an age of planetary crises such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and plastic pollution, which take a huge toll on communities all around the world, endangering their fundamental interests. But can the lack of government action on these crises, or action that worsens them, amount to violations of human rights? Many courts are grappling with this question, as rights-based litigation becomes increasingly common. By focusing on climate change and plastic pollution as case studies, this book examines the viability of rights claims when confronting planetary crises in courts. From early attempts to pursue rights claims in response to planetary crises in the 2000s, to high-profile court wins in such cases in the 2010s, and to the spread of such cases across dozens of jurisdictions by the 2020s, rights claims in climate change and plastic pollution litigation have become a truly global phenomenon. Through a systematic and in-depth analysis of such litigation in more than thirty jurisdictions, this book identifies factors that determine the viability of rights claims when confronting planetary crises. It reveals that, even though not all litigation fora are equally favourable to such claims, human rights can indeed be successfully invoked in different types of legal action.
This book will be of considerable interest to policymakers, legal scholars and practitioners, as well as students, who work in or study environmental and climate change law, human rights law, constitutional law, and international and comparative law
Environmental liability under scrutiny: the margins of applying the EU “polluter pays” principle against the owners of the polluted land who did not contribute to the pollution
Get PDFThe origins of the case Fipa Group and Others date back to the period from the 1960s–1980s, when two companies belonging to the industrial group Montedison SpA (now Edison SpA), Farmoplant SpA and Cersam Srl, operated an industrial site for the manufacture of insecticides and herbicides in a municipality of the Province of Massa Carrara in Tuscany, Italy.1 As a result of these industrial activities, massive contamination of the surrounding land by various chemical substances, including dichloroethane and ammonia, occurred.2 In 1995, the land was partly decontaminated; however, the decontamination proved to be inadequate. In 1998 the area was proclaimed a ‘site of national interest’ under Italian law for the purposes of its rehabilitation.
Air pollution, polluter-pays principle and environmental liability directive
Get PDFOn 13 July 2017 the European Court of Justice (ECJ) delivered a preliminary ruling in the case Túrkevei Tejtermelő Kft.468 The case concerned the interpretation of the polluter-pays principle under Directive 2004/35/EC (Environmental Liability Directive)469 and Articles 191 and 193 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU).470 The circumstances of the case are as follows: On 2 July 2014, the Hungarian Lower Environmental Protection Agency was informed that municipal waste was being incinerated at the Túrkevei Tejtermelő Kft. (TTK) facility in the town of Túrkeve, Hungary. Upon the inspection of the site, the Agency staff found three storage units containing 30 to 40 m3 of incinerated municipal waste, including tin cans and other metallic waste, while more metallic waste resulting from the incineration was found in a 5 x 5 metre area outside the storage units. The inspectors also found three lorries ready to transport the incinerated metallic waste
UK's legalisation of mitochondrial donation in IVF treatment: a challenge to the international community or a promotion of life-saving medical innovation to be followed by others?
Get PDFMitochondrial DNA diseases are rare genetic disorders, which can have a devastating effect on the patients’ health and well-being. There is no cure for such diseases, although the recent experiments suggest that there may be a way to prevent them, by genetically altering the eggs or embryos through a procedure known as mitochondrial donation. However, such procedure not only raises serious safety and ethical concerns, but legal challenges as well, since it involves germline gene modification, which until recently was not legal in the UK or elsewhere. In February 2015 the UK Parliament amended the relevant legislation to allow such procedure, making UK the first state to openly challenge the global policy on germline gene modification. The article presents the scientific background to the procedure and discusses theregulatory challenges brought by the first case of its legalization
Principles on climate obligations of enterprises, by Expert Group on Climate Obligations of Enterprises [Book Review]
No full textThe human right to a healthy environment, edited by John H. Knox and Ramin Pejan, Cambridge University Press, 2018 [Book Review]
No full textSubmission to the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child on the draft General Comment No. 27 on children’s right to access to justice and to an effective remedy
Get PDFClimate change and mental health: A human rights perspective
Get PDFClimate change-related environmental harms have been observed to negatively affect mental health. While policymakers and courts around the world widely recognise the impacts of climate change on physical heath as potentially endangering human rights, the implications of climate change for mental health have received significantly less attention. This paper analysed 5 cases that challenged national response to climate change and the resulting impacts on mental health before 4 different international human rights protection bodies. 4 out of these 5 cases were dismissed either because the petitioners did not seek prior action before the national authorities, or because their claims were deemed unsubstantiated. Despite these outcomes, the protection bodies’ treatment of these petitions as well as various other ongoing developments show that the human rights approach to climate change and mental health is gradually emerging at the international and domestic levels, but it is still in its early days and there are various challenges to it
Environmental rights: the development of standards, eds Stephen J. Turner, Dinah L. Shelton, Jona Razzaque, Owen McIntyre and James R. May [Book Review]
Get PDFAdditional remarks on 'International Climate Change Law', edited by Bodansky et al. {Book Review]
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