Suchergebnisse

Dr. Elisabeth Selbert, who took her A levels in self-study and completed her law degree in six semesters, did her doctorate – ahead of her time – on the principle of irretrievable breakdown of marriage. As a member of the Parliamentary Council, she was one of the four 'mothers' of the German Constitution. The inclusion of 'Men and women shall have equal rights' in Art. 3 (2) of the Basic Law ('Grundgesetz') is her merit. On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of the 'Grundgesetz', this contribution aims to portray her life, achievements and impact in a short profile.

In Community of La Oroya v. Peru the IACtHR for the first time found a violation of the autonomous right to a healthy environment in a non-indigenous context related to the long-lasting environmental contamination of a community by toxic substances. La Oroya lays foundational principles that will likely shape the content and direction of environmental and climate change litigation and jurisprudence in the Americas. This historic judgment provides a robust basis for anticipating how the Court will handle the specification of environmental rights within the climate emergency and how it may accordingly inform States' human rights obligations.

In conversations on missing female voices in the traditional development of international law a repetitive argument given as an explanation for the absence of women as active designers and contributors to international law is that it was simply unusual to find women in certain professions at that time due to the assignment of gender roles and corresponding conduct and activities considered as adequate. There is certainly a great deal of truth in this explanation. Nevertheless, the argument that the absence of women was a normal side effect of the traditional social circumstances at that time could also serve as an excuse to overlook, ignore and make women invisible, who have actually played a crucial role as active designers of the international legal order. One of them is Christine de Pizan.

On September 23, 2022, the UN Human Rights Committee (Committee) published its groundbreaking decision in Daniel Billy et al. v. Australia, in which it found that Australia's failure to adequately protect indigenous islanders from the Torres Strait region against adverse impacts of climate change amounted to a violation of their rights to enjoy their culture and to private life, family and home. In this contribution, I will outline the key findings of the decision and the underlying strands of the Committee's arguments, to then analyze and critically reflect upon them against the background of currently discussed challenges faced by human rights dogma in the context of climate change. I will argue that the Committee took a hesitant and restraint position regarding victim status and the right to life with dignity, thereby also failing to account for harms located in the (further) future. Furthermore, the position is taken that the Committee's questionable decision to exclusively focus on adaptation measures while remaining silent on obligations of mitigation was also owed to methodological hurdles internal to current human rights law. Despite these aforementioned shortcomings, it will be highlighted that the Committee still managed to overcome previously controversial admissibility hurdles bringing the case to the merits. Consequently, the Committee issued the first decision at the international level to tackle substantive human rights questions in the context of climate change that relate to the current situation of small islands and their indigenous inhabitants, thereby taking human rights protection in the climate change context to the next level.