Human Rights Integration in EU Climate Law and Policy: Between Concept and Practice in the Pursuit of Climate Ambition

Amidst the rise of climate change on the global agenda, the transition to a carbon net neutral economy has become the top priority of EU policymaking with a time-horizon towards 2050. This overarching objective has been implemented in the formulation of the European Green Deal in 2019, as well as the ‘Fit for 55’ legislative package. This article presents the development of an analytical framework of policy integration with an emphasis on the legal and regulatory perspective. It builds on existing approaches within the environmental and climate policy integration literatures and applies their fundamental concepts and evaluative criteria to the integration of human rights and principles of justice. The debate on human rights’ integration has been dominated by purely political science approaches that have not paid sufficient attention to the legal perspective, which is becoming more important as we move from a conceptual understanding of associated human rights to their codification as legal entities. Therefore, an interdisciplinary approach can bridge the gap between the two literatures by focusing on the transformation of normative principles into enforceable and justiciable legal rules. Finally, the framework integrates jurisprudential principles of climate justice to define the conceptual scope of a typology of such rules: in other words, to answer the question, which rights? The article applies this framework to the assessment of three types of rights. The first type is the generalized right to the environment with an emphasis on resolution HRC/RES/48/13 of the UN Human Rights Council on “the human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.” The second type is procedural environmental rights; the paper focuses on the European level with an analysis of the codification of these through the ratification of the 1998 Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters and the developments associated with their transposition to European legislation. The third type focuses on rights that emanate from the human rights’ turn in climate change litigation. The paper surveys the latest developments and emerging trends in this area to identify the potential for the integration of additional human rights based on existing normative principles as well as the use of litigation as a strategy to increase climate ambition. In so doing, the article assesses the potential tradeoffs along the way to a principled goal of carbon neutrality that may give rise to new human rights but may also have negative effects on existing ones.