Webinar: Looking back to look ahead: Implications of Saachi et al. v Argentina for human rights and climate change [1 November 2021]

The ruling, decided between the Human Rights Council’s recognition of a right to environment and next month’s Conference of Parties (COP26), has been described as a “historic ruling” and has attracted a lot of attention. Among its findings, the Committee was convinced that the five States had effective control over the activities that are the sources of emissions that contribute to the reasonably foreseeable harm to children outside their territories. It then concluded that a sufficient causal link had been established between the harm alleged by the 16 children and the acts or omissions of the five States for the purposes of establishing jurisdiction, and that the children had sufficiently justified that the harm that they had personally suffered was significant. However, the Committee could not proceed to adjudicate on whether the five States parties had violated their obligations to the Convention on the Rights of the Child, as the petitioners did not exhaust local remedies. The decision relied on jurisprudence from different human rights bodies, especially the Inter-American Court on Human Rights. This Webinar - “Looking back to look ahead: Implications of Saachi et al. v Argentina for human rights and climate change” - will unpack some of the implications of the case.

The following experts will join us:

• Prof John Knox is an internationally recognized expert on human rights law and international environmental law and is the former Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment (2012-2018). He is the Henry C. Lauerman Professor of International Law at Wake Forest University, in North Carolina, where he teaches and writes on human rights law, environmental law, and their relationship with one another.
• Prof Hélène Tigroudja serves on the UN Human Rights Committee and is a Senior Global Fellow at New York University School of Law; Law Professor at Aix-Marseille University (France), Co-Director of the Law School’s Master Program of International Law, Director of the Summer School on Practice of Human Rights and Expert on reparations before the International Criminal Court. She has conducted research and taught in various universities.
• Ms Soledad García Muñoz is the Special Rapporteur on Economic, Social, Cultural, and Environmental Rights, from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, OAS. She has provided professional and voluntary services to different agencies of the United Nations, to Amnesty International, the Ibero-American Youth Organization, among other prestigious organizations. Before her tenure as Special Rapporteur, she was the regional representative for South America of the Inter-American Institute of Human Rights based in Montevideo, Uruguay.
• Prof Benyam Mezmur is a member of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child and served as its Chairperson from 2015-2017. He was also a member of the ACERWC (2010-2021) at the African Union. He is the Head of the Children’s Rights Project at the Dullah Omar Institute, and Deputy Dean: Research and Postgraduate Studies at the Faculty of Law, University of the Western Cape.
• CSO representative involved in climate change child rights litigation (TBC)

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