Pick our Brains - Corina Heri: Interpreting Environmental Human Rights: narratives of scarcity in climate litigation

The Pick our Brains sessions of the Maastricht Centre for Human Rights are for both PhD students and more senior members of our Centre and members of other research centres and universities. These sessions are intended as a mode of intellectual stimulation and exchange, or to potentially promote collaborations within/outside the Centre. The session are also designed as an opportunity to get feedback on ongoing/upcoming research, showcase recent research and events at which you presented, as well as to enable an exchange of scholarly ideas. Each session contains a short presentation and a lively debate. 

These sessions will take place physically and online. The Teams link for the online sessions will be distributed later.

On 9 April our speaker is Dr. Corina Heri (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). The title of the presentation is Interpreting environmental human rights: narratives of scarcity in climate litigation.

Biography: 
Corina Heri is Associate Professor of human rights and climate change at Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB) and PI of TEMPORALAW project funded by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) under its Odysseus scheme. The central themes of her research are human rights law, climate change, the role of courts and vulnerability in the law.

Abstract:
This presentation will discuss human rights law’s relationship with (narrative) change as expressed in dominant approaches to its interpretation. Centering the example of the European Court of Human Rights, it will argue that this Court’s relationship with change and indeed its interpretative ethic as a whole is determined by an overarching narrative, namely one of scarcity. This narrative explains limits to human rights law’s interpretation through an economic lens that juxtaposes infinite human needs and desires with limited national and judicial resources, limiting human rights in service to a particular kind of economic thinking. Using the example of the Court’s climate cases as a focal point, the presentation will argue for reinventing the dominant interpretative narrative. Staying with the example of climate change, it will propose a refiguring of scarcity – from being about scarce judicial and economic resources for engaging with climate change, to focusing on scarce remaining emissions. This could serve to galvanize legal change and help to confront backlash against climate-related rulings. The discussion of narrative, scarcity and interpretation will be situated against the broader background of the ‘greening’ of Strasbourg case-law, institutional considerations, and the cross-regime debates and dialogues surrounding these developments.