Will human rights save the Anthropos from the Anthropocene?
By Jasmijn Leeuwenkamp
Bleached coral by Hitoshi Namura courtesy of Unsplash
Is human rights law our most promising ally in moving states to prevent ongoing climate change and ecological destruction? It is often suggested that a transnational governing body is required to make sure that states conform to the (quite minimal) climate goals they have agreed to in such treaties as the Paris Agreement. In the absence of such a governing body, many have appealed to international human rights law with the hope that it might force states to take more action against climate change. Given that climate change will endanger people’s most basic human rights, such as the right to food, water, life, and livelihood – of both present and future generations – international human rights law can be a powerful tool to enforce states to meet climate goals. The growing number of climate litigation cases across the world illustrates just how important the human rights framework has become for environmentalist actors.
The Urgenda case
The 2019 case of the Urgenda climate foundation is exemplary in this regard. Here, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that the Dutch government had to reduce its carbon emissions to fulfil the human rights obligations to its citizens under international law. The climate foundation accused the Dutch government of failing to protect its citizens’ lives and well-being, demanding that the state reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by at least 25 percent, compared to 1990, by 2020. Urgenda, the Dutch NGO who brought the case, eventually won by referring, amongst other legal documents, to the ‘right to life’ (article 2) and the ‘right to respect for private and family life’ (article 8) of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
The inherent anthropocentrism that underpins human rights should be a more important consideration for those who advocate that climate change or ‘the Anthropocene’ should be understood as a human rights issue.
However, despite its success, and the unquestionable importance of such climate litigation cases in a political context of rising anti-climate populism, human rights law is an ambiguous ally in the Anthropocene. My chapter in International Law and Posthuman Theory, ‘Will Human Rights save the Anthropos from the Anthropocene?’, suggests that reframing the climate crisis as an international human rights issue has at least two important limitations. The first is that human rights are inherently anthropocentric, which means that human views and needs (seen as separate from the nonhuman ecosystem of which they are part) are inevitably centred. This ensures that human rights, as applied in climate litigation cases, inevitably prioritize human over non-human life. The second limitation is that, as posthuman and postcolonial theory have both shown, the anthropocentrism of human rights is conceptually and historically tied to a hierarchical logic that defines the human in a way that implicitly idealizes a western, white, rational, male, and disembodied subject which tends to exclude other ways of being human.
In sum, the chapter proposes that human rights law is grounded problematically in an outdated humanist framework of exclusive human mastery and control over ‘nature’ that creates destructive relationships to beings traditionally regarded or treated as ‘objects’, such as nonhuman animals and ecosystems. A focus solely on human rights is not only anthropocentric but can, in fact, endanger nonhuman life through, for example, an emphasis on human property, health and food rights. Upholding these rights sometimes involves the instrumentalization and disregard of nonhuman life.
Humanist exclusions
Moreover the Urgenda case only focused on Dutch citizens living in the Netherlands, excluding the human rights of the citizens of the Kingdom of the Netherlands living in the Caribbean for whom the average global temperature increase (1.5-2°C) agreed at Paris is not ‘safe’ at all. One could in this regard argue that despite their universal language human rights fail to protect the people who need them the most. This exclusion is especially indefensible when one considers the well-known asymmetry between those responsible for and those mostly affected by climate change. The fact that many countries in the Global South cannot afford to think about future generations is not recognized by those who approach climate change in a universal manner. In other words, the universal ‘human’ of human rights and the notion of a universal anthropos in ‘Anthropocene’ mask exclusions and related inequalities in power, responsibility, and vulnerability that characterize the climate crisis.
The inherent anthropocentrism that underpins human rights should be a more important consideration for those who advocate that climate change or ‘the Anthropocene’ should be understood as a human rights issue. This anthropocentrism is one of the deeper root causes of our distorted relationship with the environment. Moreover, by referring to universal human rights such an approach does not leave enough room for radically alternative ideas of what it means to be human in relation to nonhumans in the first place. We need legal framings that are not biased towards a Western conception of ‘humanity’, that open space for ontologies that emphasize non-hierarchical and non-destructive relations to humans and nonhumans and recognize the importance of place. It means holding states accountable, not for neglecting our individual rights as rational beings, but for failing to take on the responsibility of care for the different forms of human and nonhuman life that are entangled to its real and material ways of living.
Jasmijn Leeuwenkamp is a PhD candidate in political philosophy and the environmental humanities at the University of Amsterdam. Her published and forthcoming work centers around posthumanism, anthropocentrism and (non)human rights.
This article is original content published under a Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND 4.0
