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Negotiating by own standards? The use and validity of human rights norms in UN climate negotiations

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Abstract

Since its inception, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change has been inclined to natural scientific and technocratic perceptions of climate change challenges and policy solutions. Furthermore, states have traditionally been depicted as the main subjects of international climate politics. Only in 2010, concrete references to human rights were incorporated into UN climate agreements. This has a double binding force: First, states thereby re-emphasize the principal validity of those standards that they have acknowledged—qua signature and/or ratification—as guiding their actions: the social and political rights that are captured in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the two binding human rights covenants. Second, the incorporation of human rights norms into UN climate agreements officially and formally broadens the normative scope of negotiating and implementing these policies. However, after 2010, states have neither substantiated this engagement nor further built on it argumentatively. In contrast, human rights references are—again—mostly absent from states’ positioning in UNFCCC politics. In this article, we aim at explaining this empirical puzzle. In the first part, we elaborate our theoretical approach and carve out the functional, political and legal linkages between human rights and climate politics. Building upon participatory observation, expert interviews and analysis of primary and secondary documents, this will then be followed by explaining parties’ anew reluctance to further apply a human rights-based approach in climate politics.

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Notes

  1. Frame alignment is different from issue linkage, which broadens the zone of possible agreement through the simultaneous negotiation of separate issues (Haas 1980; Sebenius 1983; Davis 2004; Poast 2012). In contrast, frame alignment does not require the concurrent resolution of two different negotiation items. Still, both processes are likely to be hampered when impartible issues like recognition or moral values are introduced. Therefore, negotiators often focus on negotiable sub-items that can be resolved through trade, compromise and technical solutions (Hirschmann 1994; Aubert 1972; Zürn et al. 1990; Mitchell 2006).

  2. One seminal institution in this regard is the 1998 Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters. Also, jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights has been inclined to strengthening procedural aspects (Francioni 2010).

  3. Some observers note that this approach has remained dominant until today (Francioni 2010; Gupta 2007).

  4. The broader linkage between the environment and human rights emerged in regional bodies and instruments, e.g., in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and Art. 11(1) of the Additional Protocol to the American Convention on Human Rights in the Area of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (Müllerová no date) and the ‘Manual on Human Rights and the Environment’ by the Council of Europe (2005). See Gupta (2007) for a list of legal actions in different parts of the world and Francioni (2010) for a detailed review of environmental considerations in the European Convention on Human Rights, the African Charter, and the American Convention on Human Rights. Examples of developing national climate change jurisprudence can be found in the USA (National Environment Policy Act, the Clean Air Act and the Endangered Species Act), in Australia (on land use planning decisions in respect of coal mines), in Nigeria (on human rights violations from gas flaring) and in Germany (on access to information on export credits).

  5. One reason for this could be that there were many cases in Latin America, in which climate policy implementation had led to human rights infringements, especially among indigenous peoples. While this is not to say that this did not happen in other countries or regions as well, those countries became pressured from inside by oppositional advocacy groups and their active civil society base, and from outside through international channels to work against those effects (Expert Interview, Representative of an Environmental Think Tank, 16th November 2013, COP-19 in Warsaw). Recently, in some cases, pressure has raised to a level in which CDM projects, such as Barro Blanco in Panama, became suspended at the order of the government (Carbon Market Watch 2015).

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  1. University of Münster, Münster, Germany

    Linda Wallbott

  2. University of Stirling, Stirling, UK

    Andrea Schapper

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  1. Linda Wallbott
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Wallbott, L., Schapper, A. Negotiating by own standards? The use and validity of human rights norms in UN climate negotiations. Int Environ Agreements 17, 209–228 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10784-015-9315-4

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