IMPROVING HUMAN RIGHTS PERFORMANCE IN EU CLIMATE POLICY. The role of European states in climate measures, and access to justice for affected populations. (original) (raw)
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The 2015 Paris Agreement includes an explicit reference to human rights in its Preamble and a number of implicit (or indirect) references within other provisions of the treaty. The inclusion of a human rights approach in the climate change regime is the result of the hard work of a coalition of non-governmental organizations (NGOs), international bodies and some states over the past few decades. Regime interaction, then, requires time and perseverance. We suggest that the hard work of regime interaction will need to continue if climate change and human rights regimes are to develop an integrated narrative. With this in mind, we explore the role that international human rights courts and court-like bodies could play in this process. This essay first addresses the conceptual framework that informs our analysis, that is regime interaction (Section 2). Thereafter, it briefly considers the distinct conceptual narratives that underpin the human rights regime and the climate change regime, and their potential for interaction (Section 3). The analysis continues focusing on how the interaction between human rights and climate change regimes has transpired at the level of normative development (Section 4). In order to contextualize this development, this section first addresses the interaction between human rights and environmental regimes at a more general level (Section 4.1). Subsequently, it considers how the climate change regime has interacted with human rights en route to Paris (Section 4.2). The essay then proceeds to address the role of international human rights courts and court-like bodies in the interaction between human rights and environmental regimes, including the climate change regime (Section 5).
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