Centring the career of Cameroonian diplomat Paul Bamela Engo during the negotiation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, this article makes a methodological intervention in the historiography of multilateral treaty-making. It reads through and against the grain of dominant narratives of oceanic constitution-making, and offers counter-narratives that serve as conceptual and mobilizational resources in contemporary struggles. It examines how the ‘stock story’ of the emergence of the resource regime for seabed minerals as the common heritage of mankind erases the radical alternatives that were proposed by Third World actors and their efforts to write them into law, and sorts these actors into trope-laden categories of ‘extremist’ and ‘moderate’. Against this, and building on critical race theorist Richard Delgado’s exploration of counterstorytelling, this article traces histories that position Third World diplomats and lawyers as intellectual innovators and rival worldmakers. Extending the field of international intellectual history, and examining international lawmaking conferences as a political form, these histories link UNCLOS to wider anticolonial and worldmaking projects. Connecting analyses at multiple spatial and temporal scales, such histories also offer an empirically-grounded approach to the agency and structural constraints of Third World actors negotiating international legal orders, and illuminate international lawmaking as a promising site for global history.
{"title":"The seabed and the South: from stock stories to new histories of international lawmaking","authors":"Surabhi Ranganathan","doi":"10.4337/jhre.2023.0004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2023.0004","url":null,"abstract":"Centring the career of Cameroonian diplomat Paul Bamela Engo during the negotiation of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, this article makes a methodological intervention in the historiography of multilateral treaty-making. It reads through and against the grain of dominant narratives of oceanic constitution-making, and offers counter-narratives that serve as conceptual and mobilizational resources in contemporary struggles. It examines how the ‘stock story’ of the emergence of the resource regime for seabed minerals as the common heritage of mankind erases the radical alternatives that were proposed by Third World actors and their efforts to write them into law, and sorts these actors into trope-laden categories of ‘extremist’ and ‘moderate’. Against this, and building on critical race theorist Richard Delgado’s exploration of counterstorytelling, this article traces histories that position Third World diplomats and lawyers as intellectual innovators and rival worldmakers. Extending the field of international intellectual history, and examining international lawmaking conferences as a political form, these histories link UNCLOS to wider anticolonial and worldmaking projects. Connecting analyses at multiple spatial and temporal scales, such histories also offer an empirically-grounded approach to the agency and structural constraints of Third World actors negotiating international legal orders, and illuminate international lawmaking as a promising site for global history.","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":"199 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-11-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139296783","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
"Book review: Sumudu A Atapattu, Carmen G Gonzalez and Sara L Seck (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Justice and Sustainable Development (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2021) 476 pp." published on 22 Sep 2023 by Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.
书评:Sumudu A Atapattu, Carmen G Gonzalez和Sara L Seck(编)，《剑桥环境正义与可持续发展手册》(剑桥大学出版社，剑桥2021)476页，2023年9月22日由爱德华·埃尔加出版有限公司出版。
{"title":"Book review: Sumudu A Atapattu, Carmen G Gonzalez and Sara L Seck (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Justice and Sustainable Development (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2021) 476 pp.","authors":"Atieno Mboya","doi":"10.4337/jhre.2023.02.05","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2023.02.05","url":null,"abstract":"\"Book review: Sumudu A Atapattu, Carmen G Gonzalez and Sara L Seck (eds), The Cambridge Handbook of Environmental Justice and Sustainable Development (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2021) 476 pp.\" published on 22 Sep 2023 by Edward Elgar Publishing Ltd.","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136010827","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article addresses issues of climate and environmental injustice through the lens of electric vehicle (EV) usage. The current market for batteries relies very heavily on Lithium-Ion (Li-Ion) batteries, as they provide ‘high efficiency and low cost’. In 2020, BloombergNEF forecast that by 2040, 58 per cent of global passenger vehicles sales would be EVs, with demand for batteries rising commensurately. Between 2010 and 2021, the average unit price for EV batteries fell from $1200 to $132 per kW/h. The article considers the environmental impacts of EVs and assesses the extent to which impacts on local communities are reflected accurately in calculations of the benefits of EV technology. It concludes that whilst the carbon emissions and impact on the climate of using EVs is significantly lower than for using petrol or diesel vehicles, the current cost of the technology simply does not reflect the disproportionate impact on the populations living near the extraction sites for the minerals needed in EV batteries.
{"title":"Paradise lost? The red right hand of green technology","authors":"Simon Sneddon","doi":"10.4337/jhre.2023.02.03","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2023.02.03","url":null,"abstract":"This article addresses issues of climate and environmental injustice through the lens of electric vehicle (EV) usage. The current market for batteries relies very heavily on Lithium-Ion (Li-Ion) batteries, as they provide ‘high efficiency and low cost’. In 2020, BloombergNEF forecast that by 2040, 58 per cent of global passenger vehicles sales would be EVs, with demand for batteries rising commensurately. Between 2010 and 2021, the average unit price for EV batteries fell from $1200 to $132 per kW/h. The article considers the environmental impacts of EVs and assesses the extent to which impacts on local communities are reflected accurately in calculations of the benefits of EV technology. It concludes that whilst the carbon emissions and impact on the climate of using EVs is significantly lower than for using petrol or diesel vehicles, the current cost of the technology simply does not reflect the disproportionate impact on the populations living near the extraction sites for the minerals needed in EV batteries.","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":"79 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136010825","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Due to the nature of environmental litigation, expanding the standing of actors that could bring claims to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) – such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – has become a pressing need. This article explores the current approach to NGOs’ standing to bring environment-related claims before the ECtHR. In particular, by drawing on the Aarhus Convention, the article explores NGOs’ important role before the ECtHR given their recognized right to environmental information, as well as their role in upholding the right to a fair trial at national level. In conclusion, it is argued that NGOs should be given a more prominent role in environmental cases and that the dichotomy between the case law regarding NGOs’ standing in claims under Articles 2, 3 and 8 on the one hand, and Articles 6 and 10 on the other, is outdated.
{"title":"Expanding NGOs’ standing: climate justice through access to the European Court of Human Rights","authors":"Helen Keller, Viktoriya Gurash","doi":"10.4337/jhre.2023.02.04","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2023.02.04","url":null,"abstract":"Due to the nature of environmental litigation, expanding the standing of actors that could bring claims to the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) – such as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) – has become a pressing need. This article explores the current approach to NGOs’ standing to bring environment-related claims before the ECtHR. In particular, by drawing on the Aarhus Convention, the article explores NGOs’ important role before the ECtHR given their recognized right to environmental information, as well as their role in upholding the right to a fair trial at national level. In conclusion, it is argued that NGOs should be given a more prominent role in environmental cases and that the dichotomy between the case law regarding NGOs’ standing in claims under Articles 2, 3 and 8 on the one hand, and Articles 6 and 10 on the other, is outdated.","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136010826","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The climate crisis is here presented as an assemblage of synergistic violences, including lethal violence to human and nonhuman bodies, violence to territories, and the violence of legal and extra-legal words. I extrapolate from Robert Cover’s thesis on the relationship between legal words and violence and focus upon the interplay between words and climate violence and, in particular, on the paucity of existing terminology and framings in relation to this phenomenon. Despite findings in some civil climate lawsuits that a continuing failure to mitigate on the part of nations of the Global North will violate the right to life, the terminology of murder is not widely adopted and no prosecutions have ensued. Similarly, the severity of inter-State territorial violence, as a consequence of a failure to mitigate and historical and ongoing emissions on the part of developed nations, is downplayed in international law through the strategic deployment of framings such as ‘disappearing States’, security threats, and ‘loss and damage’. Finally, the climate crisis is entangled with the violence of law. Yet law’s violence, rather than targeting corporate and State perpetrators of climate violence, is directed against non-violent climate activists who are portrayed as terrorists. I explore underlying reasons for this. Viewing climate change as a material manifestation of intersecting forms of violence reveals law’s complicities and limitations, and highlights the importance of narrative framings and language in understanding and addressing the climate crisis.
{"title":"Climate violence and the word","authors":"Nicole Rogers","doi":"10.4337/jhre.2023.02.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2023.02.02","url":null,"abstract":"The climate crisis is here presented as an assemblage of synergistic violences, including lethal violence to human and nonhuman bodies, violence to territories, and the violence of legal and extra-legal words. I extrapolate from Robert Cover’s thesis on the relationship between legal words and violence and focus upon the interplay between words and climate violence and, in particular, on the paucity of existing terminology and framings in relation to this phenomenon. Despite findings in some civil climate lawsuits that a continuing failure to mitigate on the part of nations of the Global North will violate the right to life, the terminology of murder is not widely adopted and no prosecutions have ensued. Similarly, the severity of inter-State territorial violence, as a consequence of a failure to mitigate and historical and ongoing emissions on the part of developed nations, is downplayed in international law through the strategic deployment of framings such as ‘disappearing States’, security threats, and ‘loss and damage’. Finally, the climate crisis is entangled with the violence of law. Yet law’s violence, rather than targeting corporate and State perpetrators of climate violence, is directed against non-violent climate activists who are portrayed as terrorists. I explore underlying reasons for this. Viewing climate change as a material manifestation of intersecting forms of violence reveals law’s complicities and limitations, and highlights the importance of narrative framings and language in understanding and addressing the climate crisis.","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":"44 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136010829","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Over time, international environmental law has increasingly accommodated principles of equity and justice. Yet, climate equity remains a contentious, if not exclusionary, concept. This article applies new materialist theory and a posthuman perspective to climate equity. It explores the concept of climate (in)equity as enshrined in existing climate jurisprudence, and attempts to reimagine the concept in order to incorporate the subjectivity and interests of non-human matter into an otherwise enclosed and marketized climate-change legal discourse. The analysis in this article finds that prejudicial approaches to climate equity that prioritize dominant human subjects produce unjust consequences for excluded, vulnerable human populations and for non-human subjects, with these unjust consequences shaping both policy and lived experience. The article suggests that adopting new materialist/posthuman ontological and epistemological pluralism will support the incorporation of human–non-human entanglements in climate equity, and that such a determination must extend to reforming the inequitable enclosures and exclusions driven by the climate equity assemblage.
{"title":"Reimagining climate equity to incorporate the non-human","authors":"Hannah Blitzer","doi":"10.4337/jhre.2023.02.01","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2023.02.01","url":null,"abstract":"Over time, international environmental law has increasingly accommodated principles of equity and justice. Yet, climate equity remains a contentious, if not exclusionary, concept. This article applies new materialist theory and a posthuman perspective to climate equity. It explores the concept of climate (in)equity as enshrined in existing climate jurisprudence, and attempts to reimagine the concept in order to incorporate the subjectivity and interests of non-human matter into an otherwise enclosed and marketized climate-change legal discourse. The analysis in this article finds that prejudicial approaches to climate equity that prioritize dominant human subjects produce unjust consequences for excluded, vulnerable human populations and for non-human subjects, with these unjust consequences shaping both policy and lived experience. The article suggests that adopting new materialist/posthuman ontological and epistemological pluralism will support the incorporation of human–non-human entanglements in climate equity, and that such a determination must extend to reforming the inequitable enclosures and exclusions driven by the climate equity assemblage.","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":"51 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136010824","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book review: Eve Darian-Smith, Global Burning: Rising Antidemocracy and the Climate Crisis (Stanford University Press, Stanford 2022) 230 pp.","authors":"Charles Lawrie","doi":"10.4337/jhre.2023.02.06","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2023.02.06","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":"9 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136010828","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Climate change, violence, exclusion and law","authors":"","doi":"10.4337/jhre.2023.02.00","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2023.02.00","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":"32 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136010967","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book review: Jana Norman, Posthuman Legal Subjectivity: Reimagining the Human in the Anthropocene (Routledge, Abingdon 2022) 186 pp.","authors":"Cristy Clark","doi":"10.4337/jhre.2023.01.07","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2023.01.07","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.7,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45543252","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Indigenous Traditional Knowledge (ITK) has been at the centre of heated debates about patent and intellectual protection for a long time. Efforts to normatively regulate the protection of ITK are imbued by a property-based logic associated most prominently with intellectual property regimes, which focus primarily on its economic value. However, such an approach collides with the spiritual, cultural and sacred character of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge. This article aims to provide an alternative for ITK protection through the revamping of the Traditional Knowledge Commons (TKC) concept. It elucidates those TKC traits beneficial to Indigenous communities and identifies potential challenges associated with TKC implementation. The article highlights instances of successfully enacted TKC as evidence of the economic and social capacity of such communitarian schemes, which can further empower Indigenous communities. Lastly, the article explores the viability of establishing a commons-alike ITK management regime on a global scale given the divergent views and aspirations both of communities providing ITK and potential ITK users.
{"title":"An (un)common remedy to Indigenous communities’ subsistence: revisiting Traditional Knowledge Commons","authors":"Christos Zois, Vassilis Pergantis","doi":"10.4337/jhre.2023.01.02","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4337/jhre.2023.01.02","url":null,"abstract":"Indigenous Traditional Knowledge (ITK) has been at the centre of heated debates about patent and intellectual protection for a long time. Efforts to normatively regulate the protection of ITK are imbued by a property-based logic associated most prominently with intellectual property regimes, which focus primarily on its economic value. However, such an approach collides with the spiritual, cultural and sacred character of Indigenous Traditional Knowledge. This article aims to provide an alternative for ITK protection through the revamping of the Traditional Knowledge Commons (TKC) concept. It elucidates those TKC traits beneficial to Indigenous communities and identifies potential challenges associated with TKC implementation. The article highlights instances of successfully enacted TKC as evidence of the economic and social capacity of such communitarian schemes, which can further empower Indigenous communities. Lastly, the article explores the viability of establishing a commons-alike ITK management regime on a global scale given the divergent views and aspirations both of communities providing ITK and potential ITK users.","PeriodicalId":43831,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Human Rights and the Environment","volume":"69 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135573983","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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