Available in Russian
Authors: Ekaterina Bliznetskaya, Varvara Abaturova
DOI: 10.21128/2226-2059-2023-4-37-57
Keywords: climate change; human rights abuse; Paris Agreement; compliance procedure; human rights treaty bodies; European Court of Human Rights
Global climate change, legally anchored as such in the 1992 U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change and the 2015 Paris Agreement, is a comprehensive issue, resulting in the human rights abuse. However, from the international law perspective the link between them demands clarifications. This fact is backed up by recent initiatives concerning corresponding requests for International Court of Justice, International Tribunal on Law of the Sea and Inter-American Court of Human Rights to provide advisory opinions. Therefore, the authors set out to examine whether there is a legal causal link between violations of international state obligations under treaties dealt with the issues of climate change and human rights abuse. To achieve this goal, the authors analyzed the scientific explanation on the interconnection between climate change issue and fulfilment of human rights and its legal consolidation; identified the actual human rights protection legal mechanisms and their pressing problems. To be more precise, authors scrutinized a compliance procedure under the 2015 Paris Agreement, including its influence on national judicial practice in some jurisdictions, quasi-judicial human rights treaty bodies and judicial bodies of regional systems of human rights protection. The research reveals that there are several fields to be improved, namely, the determination of necessity to anchor specific obligations prescribing the greenhouse gases reduction to have subject matter for bringing governmental agencies before national courts. Moreover, it is necessary to enhance the efficiency of compliance procedure under the 2015 Paris Agreement by adopting successful practice from other international environmental treaties. Questions remain concerning necessity to control and monitor the enforcement of non-obligatory considerations issued by human rights treaty bodies, methods to determine direct causal link of state acts or omissions in terms of climate change and human rights abuse, as well as concretization of climate change victim status.
About the authors: Ekaterina Bliznetskaya – Lecturer, Department of International Complex Problems of Natural Resources and Ecology, Institute of International Trade and Sustainable Development, MGIMO, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Expert of the Information Centre of FAO, Moscow, Russia; Varvara Abaturova – 2nd year Graduate Student, Master’s Program “International Economic Law”, International Law Faculty, MGIMO, Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Russian Federation, Moscow, Russia.
Citation: Abaturova V., Bliznetskaya E. (2023) Ispol’zovanie mekhanizmov zashchity prav cheloveka v reshenii problemy global’nogo izmeneniya klimata [Application of the human rights protection mechanism in coping with the climate change problem]. Mezhdunarodnoe pravosudie, vol. 13, no. 4, pp. 37–57.
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