The Paris Climate Agreement and the Protection of Human Rights in a Changing Climate

Abstract

On December 2005, the Inuit Circumpolar Council submitted a petition to the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, claiming that United States’ failure to reduce greenhouse gas emissions violated the rights of the Inuit people. This petition, although ultimately rejected by the Inter-American Commission, offered the first official account of the linkages between human rights and climate change. Ten years later, the negotiations of the Paris Agreement under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (Paris Agreement) offered an opportunity to address some of the concerns detailed in the Inuit petition. As the first global environmental agreement that includes an explicit reference to human rights, the Paris Agreement confirms the international community’s recognition that human rights obligations apply in the context of climate change. Whether this reference will adequately respond to the demand that underpinned the Inuit petition a decade ago remains to be seen. The present article seeks to provide an analysis of the reference to human rights contained in the Paris Agreement by reviewing the context in which this and other relevant provisions were agreed and formally adopted by the parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in the Paris Agreement. We begin by providing a chronological account of civil society initiatives to integrate human rights protections in the UN climate regime. The first section identifies three successive advocacy campaigns. While the first was unsuccessful, the second and third attempts resulted in the adoption of references to human rights in key outcomes, specifically the Cancun Agreements and the Paris Agreement. The second section focuses on the provisions of the Paris Agreement, providing an analysis of the reference to human rights and its legal significance. While human rights are mentioned in the preamble only, other principles with human rights relevance are included in both the preamble and operative text of the agreement. Finally, the article concludes with a description of key linkages between the implementation of the Paris Agreement and human rights. While many aspects of the agreement could be relevant to this analysis, this article will highlight the importance of ambition, equity, the need for climate actions to respect human rights, and the promotion of procedural rights as crucial areas of implementation from a rights perspective. The human rights legacy of the Paris Agreement will be defined to a large extent by its capacity to deliver on these four issues.