A presentation by César Rodríguez-Garavito, Professor of Clinical Law and Chair and Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law. This event is part of the Fundamental Rights Research Colloquium under the cluster "Human Rights in the Climate Crisis" hosted by the Centre for Fundamental Rights.
It is well known that democratic backsliding and the climate emergency pose some of the most formidable challenges to human rights today. As authoritarian leaders around the world seek to dismantle the democracies that brought them to power, they advance legal reforms that weaken human rights and persecute organisations that defend them. Meanwhile, the scale and severity of the impacts of global warming—from mass forced displacement to the physical and mental suffering of victims of fires, floods, heat waves, and other extreme weather events—are already calling into question the full range of human rights.
What has been much less analysed are the connections between the democratic crisis and the climate crisis. While democratic backsliding has emerged as a topic of interest for social scientists and organisations focused on civil and political rights advocacy, the climate crisis tends to concern mostly natural scientists, environmentalists, and organisations that concentrate on collective rights. Isolated in their thematic silos, analysts and advocates often lose sight of the relationship between the health of democracy and the health of the planet.
César Rodríguez-Garavito is a Professor of Clinical Law and Chair and Faculty Director of the Center for Human Rights and Global Justice at NYU School of Law. He is a human rights and environmental justice scholar and practitioner whose interests focus on global governance, climate change, socioeconomic rights, business and human rights, and the human rights movement. Rodríguez-Garavito is the Founding Director of the Climate Litigation Accelerator. He is the Editor-in-Chief of Open Global Rights and has served as a strategy advisor to leading international and domestic human rights organizations in different parts of the world. He has been an expert witness for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, an Adjunct Judge of the Constitutional Court of Colombia, a member of the Science Panel for the Amazon, and a lead litigator in climate change, socioeconomic rights, and Indigenous rights cases.
Prior registration is required. Registered attendees will receive the dial-in details as well as a draft paper, on which the presentation is based, via e-mail prior to the event.
