International Human Rights Law and Transboundary Environmental Harm: Trends and Challenges

In its landmark Advisory Opinion on the Environment and Human Rights, issued on 15 November 2017, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights recognized that the American Convention on Human Rights, under certain circumstances, involves extraterritorial obligations with respect to environmental matters. The Court further specified the content of the State obligations to protect individuals from transboundary environmental harm under the Convention. By doing so, the Court dealt with two core aspects of the relationship between human rights and the environment that, despite having been neglected so far, have the potential to increasingly come up before international bodies (and possibly, domestic courts) in the near future: the extraterritorial scope of human rights treaties in cases of crossborder environmental harm and the content of the State’s obligations to protect human rights in the face of such harm. The central argument defended in this chapter is that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ main findings shed new light on the role of international human rights law in addressing transboundary environmental harm and, contextually, provide an opportunity to critically examine not only some of the most significant current trends, but also future challenges, with respect to the relationship between human rights and the environment.