Inter-American court meeting to confront climate crisis
The relationship between human rights and the climate crisis will be explored this week, with the Inter-American Court on Human Rights hearing testimony in Barbados from experts from around the globe and from Caribbean nationals.
On Monday, the InterAmerican Court on Human Rights opened its 166th Regular Session, at the University of the West Indies at Cave Hill, where it is taking up the issue of the climate emergency and the response in the context of international human rights law.
More than 60 delegations from around the globe, including experts on human rights and climate change and from academia and nongovernmental organizations, are participating in the session, hosted by the government of Barbados. The Inter-American Court of Human Rights will hold a public hearing on a request for an advisory opinion on climate change and human rights.
The request for an advisory opinion for clarification on the scope of governments’ obligations in responding to climate change was requested by Colombia and Chile. The countries noted that both are experiencing a proliferation of droughts, floods, landslides and fires.
Still, climate effects are not being felt uniformly, leading to the effort to gather diverse opinions on governments’ obligations to their populations. A similar information-gathering effort is being carried out by the International Tribunal of the Sea and the International Court of Justice, said
Pablo Saavedra Alessandri, the registrar of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights.
“I think it is one of the most important decisions that ... we are going to produce in the next couple of months, because climate change is affecting human rights around the world,” Saavedra said.
A recent report, published in cooperation with the United Nations Development Program and the Climate Impact Lab, predicted that many coastal communities around the world, including Kingston, Jamaica, could permanently lose 5% or more of their land to sea-level rise by the end of the century because of global warming.
Climate change is expected by the year 2100 to cause the submergence of a significant portion of land in low-lying regions of the Bahamas, the British Virgin Islands, the Cayman Islands, the
Turks and Caicos Islands and in other islands around the world.