On Earth Day 2021 the Escazú Accord entered into force, binding twelve member states in Latin America and the Caribbean to Principle 10 (P10) rights – rights to information, participation in discussions around environmental projects, and access to justice. Escazú contains provisions for holding regulators and developers to account, such as guaranteeing rights to voice opinions over how lands and natural resources are used, and how citizens can gain access to justice in cases where rights are violated.
Escazú comes at a time when international attention to environmental rule of law (EROL) is rising rapidly. The UN Environment Programme, the World Resources Institute, ECLAC, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Organization of American States, and other organizations have recently reported on EROL. Moreover, rulings from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights have added pressure on Latin American states to better integrate human rights into environmental decisions. States have responded by strengthening domestic legal frameworks and environmental governance and justice institutions, but EROL remains weak.
Substantive environmental rights are sometimes hard to enforce, and activists often focus on procedural rights such as P10 for this reason. However, the two types of rights are connected. For example, access to justice – a procedural right – can lead to better outcomes on substantive rights, such as the right to a safe environment. In this paper I will examine the role of expert NGOs in making P10 rights real for vulnerable communities facing large scale development projects. Expert NGOs are ‘expert’ in the sense that they are comprised of litigators, educators, community organizers, research organizations, scientists, communicators, and others with knowledge and experience in defending procedural rights. Their purpose is to provide the resources necessary for communities to defend their rights. This approach will enable me to open the civil society concept so that distinct levels of analysis are available for closer analysis – expert NGOs, affected communities, external NGOs and thinktanks, and others.
There is surprisingly little research on the ways in which these NGOs integrate human rights and environmental governance, and much of what we know comes from civil society actors themselves rather than academics. Thus, the purpose of the paper is to explore the mechanisms and processes by which they do this, comparing across several Latin American states. I pinpoint Principle 10 rights as a way to gain traction on the HREI issue, and I plan to operationalize the research by examining environmental impact assessments in various Latin American states, and specifically how expert NGOs draw affected communities into the process and make real their procedural rights. Finally, it is worth noting that HREI has direct implications for the perceived economy-environment trade-off, because many developers perceive the growing attention to human rights as a means of reducing the economic power of developers, whether state or private, domestic or international.
