Human Nature: Understanding the Constitutional and Indigenous Context of Granting Legal Personhood to Taranaki Mounga
Last week Taranaki Mounga (mountain) joined a growing family of natural entities given legal personhood in Aotearoa New Zealand. Te Urewera was the first natural entity in the world to...
#CancelCoal: South African Youth Successfully Lead Climate Case Against Proposed Coal-Fired Power Station
On 4 December 2024, the High Court of Pretoria in South Africa (SA) handed down a landmark judgment in the “Cancel Coal” case. The High Court upheld a constitutional challenge...
A Climate Policy Under Fire: Germany’s NECP Lawsuit and EU Climate Governance
The Environmental Action Germany (Deutsche Umwelthilfe, ‘DUH’), a non-governmental environmental and consumer protection organisation in Germany, has intensified its legal challenges against the German government by filing a lawsuit over...
Constitutionalising Climate Action: India’s Supreme Court Decision on the Protection against Climate Change
Should climate change safeguards be enshrined as a human right? India’s Supreme Court seems to have resounded a definitive ‘yes’ in the case of M K Ranjitsinh and Others v...
Climate change in Strasbourg: a big victory for the human-rights agenda through the rigorous application of international human-rights law
All major challenges facing Europe today have a human-rights dimension, which sooner or later the ECtHR will be invited to examine. The Court, of course, provides legal answers to legal...
Serendipitous Sustainability: How Karnataka’s ‘Gruha Jyothi’ and ‘Shakti’ Schemes Can Bolster Climate Action
India, with its growing population and energy demands, faces a multifaceted challenge in balancing its commitment towards economic development with environmental sustainability. However, sometimes the governmental policies primarily designed for...
Ecocentrism and the Right to a Healthy Environment: To What Extent Can Human Rights Protect Non-Human Life?
In 2022, the United Nations General Assembly recognized the human right to a ‘clean, healthy, and sustainable environment’. Before the General Assembly resolution expressly recognized this right, other sources of...
Judgment of the Supreme Court of Nepal to Protect the Chure range: Widespread Environmental Destruction Deemed Ecocide
Image description: a forested area of the Chure range in Nepal In Sailendra Ambedkar v. Office of Prime Minister et. al., the Constitutional bench of Supreme Court of Nepal gave...
Appraising the Limitations of Linking Climate Reparations to Human Rights
Image Description: devastating climate-induced flooding in Pakistan Pakistan’s climate change minister Sherry Rehman recently lamented the near absence of any “reparations” for climate change given by developed States to the...
Climate Change and the Torres Strait Islands: Australia in the International Spotlight
Image Description: Over looking the Thursday Island, Torres Strait. The UN Human Rights Committee (‘UNHRC’) issued a blockbuster climate change decision on 22 September 2022, Billy et al v Australia,...
The Increased Imperative for International Law Protections Regarding Climate Induced Migration
Image description: Protesters at a march with banners reading ‘stop climate change’. Climate change is an increasingly grim and urgent problem with profound implications for refugee and asylum international law....
West Virginia v EPA: Thwarting Robust Legal Reasoning
Image description: Coat of arms of the United States Environmental Protection Agency. In West Virginia v Environmental Protection Agency (30 June 2022), a six-person majority of the US Supreme Court...