When Environmental Protection and Human Rights Collide
The Politics of Conflict Management by Regional Courts

The book illuminates the nature, extent, and political implications of normative conflicts between environmental protection laws and human rights.

Marie-Catherine Petersmann (Author)

9781316515808, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 27 October 2022

304 pages
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.2 cm, 0.6 kg

'This scholarly, well-argued, and thought-provoking book rightly problematises uncritical assertions of 'synergy' between human rights and 'the environment' and exposes tacit imaginaries facilitating the on-going absorption of environmental concerns into human rights law. Petersmann draws timely and necessary attention to normative conflicts that are all too often over-looked. Theoretically astute and doctrinally informed, this book is simultaneously critical, affirmative and future-facing. It is a powerful contribution to the field.' Anna Grear, Cardiff University

Conflicts between environmental protection laws and human rights present delicate trade-offs when concerns for social and ecological justice are increasingly intertwined. This book retraces how the legal ordering of environmental protection evolved over time and progressively merged with human rights concerns, thereby leading to a synergistic framing of their relation. It explores the world-making effects this framing performed by establishing how 'humans' ought to relate to 'nature', and examines the role played by legislators, experts and adjudicators in (re)producing it. While it questions, contextualises and problematises how and why this dominant framing was construed, it also reveals how the conflicts that underpin this relationship – and the victims they affect – mainly remained unseen. The analysis critically evaluates the argumentative tropes and adjudicative strategies used in the environmental case-law of regional courts to understand how these conflicts are judicially mediated, thereby opening space for new modes of politics, legal imagination and representation.

Part I. Constructing Synergies – Framing the Environment – Human Rights Interface: 1. Narratives of environmental and human rights protection – from a 'Pristine Wilderness' to a 'Human Environment'
2. Horizons of synergy – adjudicating environmental and human rights protection
3. Constructing and contesting anthropocentric synergies
4. Countering the dominant frame – an account of trade-offs and tensions
Part II. Conflict Mediation through Universalisation: 5. The general interest as universalisation strategy
6. Expert knowledge as universalisation strategy.

Subject Areas: Environment law [LNKJ], Public international law [LBB], Human rights [JPVH]