2021 Madame de Staël Prize Lecture

Climate Change in Human Rights Courts: Overcoming Procedural Hurdles in Transboundary Environmental Cases

The Madame de Staël Prize Lecture is an annual scientific event hosted by ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities. Each year, the laureate of the Madame de Staël Prize delivers an interactive lecture related to their own research and reflecting on current affairs in the European political and scientific landscape.

This year’s laureate, Professor Helen Keller, will deliver a lecture titled ‘Climate Change in Human Rights Courts: Overcoming Procedural Hurdles in Transboundary Environmental Cases’. A panel discussion will be held after Professor Keller’s lecture, followed by a Q&A session and a reception with a flying buffet.

The 2021 Madame de Staël Prize Lecture will take place on 6 November 2021 in a hybrid event during the Berlin Science Week. The physical event will be hosted by Embassy of Switzerland in Berlin.

Human rights bodies usually examine cases brought by individuals who have been impacted in a specific way by an act of their home State. By contrast, a new and atypical kind of case is currently emerging before domestic and international human rights bodies around the world. These are cases in which applicants allege that their human rights have been violated because of States’ and corporations’ failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

These cases are atypical not only because of the number of potential victims involved and the global nature of climate change, but also because the harms in question are often still in the future. These cases push human rights bodies to evaluate political decisions and scientific evidence. They raise questions about how to balance economic and environmental interests, how to provide redress for large-scale or systemic problems, and whether it is appropriate to allow human rights bodies to accept claims in the public interest.

To date the European Court of Human Rights has never decided a climate change case. The first two applications, however, have been filed and communicated to the parties. This lecture discusses the most significant admissibility issues that these climate change cases will face before the European Court of Human Rights and show how the Court could ensure that these admissibility hurdles could be overcome and thus climate cases can finally receive full consideration on the merits.