The Political Ecology of Climate Remedies: An Inter-American Human Rights System Prognosis

The climate crisis is already affecting and will continue to affect human and natural systems across Latin America. Undoubtedly, this jeopardizes entire communities’ enjoyment of human rights. The Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS) is therefore expected to contribute to tackling said crisis, particularly since its organs have jurisdiction to order remedies over most Latin American countries, provided they determine a rights’ violation. Despite the growing number of domestic human rights-based climate litigation in the region, none has yet reached the IAHRS. So far, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights has dismissed a climate-related case the Inuit filed against the US in 2005 and has yet to decide on a similar pending case the Athabaskan people filed against Canada in 2013. Against this backdrop, this paper seeks to answer the following questions: what types of remedies could the organs of the IAHRS order in a climate change case from Latin America? Moreover, what implementation barriers could those remedies face? In doing so, a doctrinal approach to analyse the remedial typologies of the IAHRS’s organs and a political ecology lens to understand the barriers to compliance will be employed. In that vein, the first part of the paper lays bare the practice of the IAHRS vis-à-vis remedies. Secondly, in order to extrapolate the analysis to climate-related cases, a more granular appraisal of those cases entailing environmental dimensions will be conducted. Thirdly, barriers to compliance in those cases will be compared through a political ecology reading of recent domestic climate cases.