Rights to Natural Resources and Human Rights

The paper Rights to Natural Resources and Human Rights is a part of a larger project which aims at providing criteria for a critical appraisal of the international system of sovereign rights to natural resources and at elaboration of a conception which emphasizes limits on states’ rights to natural resources. It explores the historical affinity between international law of human rights and rights of states to natural resources and the aim of both systems of international law to realize justice for self-determining collectives. The paper assumes a practice-based approach to human rights and argues that the chief purpose of human rights is to provide a universal standard for regulating the behavior of states, to limit their sovereignty for the sake of promoting welfare and protecting equal moral status of individuals. The key point of the paper is then to show that due to the historical co-originality and due to the transformative impact human rights have had on state sovereignty, international human rights law has direct implication for how we should interpret the states’ rights to natural resources – the scope of resource rights, the conditions of their rightful and legitimate exercise by states, the substantive limits on those rights, and finally how we might envision the international system of natural resource governance.