HIC-HLRN welcomes the historic Advisory Opinion from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) issued on 3 July 2025, an authoritative interpretations of binding international law and carry substantial legal weight in guiding further actions. After two and one-half years in the making, it affirms that states and corporations share common-but-differentiated obligations under international law to treat the climate crisis as a human rights issue.
The Court has clarified that human rights law and corresponding obligations create binding individual, collective, domestic and extraterritorial duties on states and their organs, including all spheres of government, to prevent, reduce and remedy the harms of the climate crisis, The ruling also affirmed the rights of present and future generations, nature itself, and those who defend the planet and its ecosystems.
We also have to thank the governments of Colombia and Chile for initiating the request for such an advisory opinion to clarify the intersection of the urgent climate emergency with states’ binding human rights obligations. Supporting the need for this clarification were the largest participatory process in the Court’s history, with states, civil society, Indigenous Peoples, and others on the frontline of the climate emergency proffering advice and opinions.
In its climate Advisory Opinion, the IACtHR clearly acknowledged the climate crisis as derogating the human rights of present and future generations, and that human rights must be at the center of any effective response. This ruling is especially timely, as it comes just ahead of the UN’s review of 37 states performance of the 2030 Agenda, with its inter-linked Sustainable Development Goals to which states pledged climate action (SDG13), while fulfilling development criteria that would realize a bundle of human rights. Nonetheless, the Agenda’s High-level Political Forum, which meets in New York from 13 to 24 July, has mostly avoided the obvious confluence of the Agenda with human rights obligations, which, in turn, underpin the global development policy commitments.
The Court restored the attribute “safety” of the environment to the definition of the right to environment. The General Assembly resolution dropped that aspect from the content of the guaranteed right defined by the UN Human Rights Council the year before. Reportedly, it was France that insisted on removing “safety” of the environment as part of the human right, anticipating that such a construct in law might put the county’s nuclear energy program into question under human rights scrutiny.
The human right to a safe climate and healthy environment is now protected by the Inter-American Human Rights System, with clear obligations for states to protect that right by regulating corporate and other human activity, adopting ambitious climate targets grounded in science and equity, and preventing irreversible harm to ecosystems and, hence, human life as part of nature. It also affirmed the prohibition against causing irreversible environmental damage, placing it among the highest-ranking duties in international law.
Notably, IACtHR dedicated a section of its opinion to states’ duty to protect defenders of land, climate, and environmental human rights. In that connection, the Court emphasized the vital role of Indigenous Peoples as a class, as well as Afro-descendant communities and youth as particularly affected by advancing environmental and climate degradation.
HIC-HLRN coordinator Joseph Schechla responded to the opinion, saying “This interpretation has been needed, especially since the UN Human Rights Council and General Assembly recognized ‘the right to environment’; it goes far in identifying the content of that rights and the state obligation corresponding to that right, which those resolutions of the political bodies did not.”
Among those obligations is addressing people’s costs, losses and damage corresponding with the human right to remedy. The Advisory Opinion stresses that Article 8 of the Paris Agreement on climate change recognized this priority. It also warns that, “given the magnitude of the anticipated impacts, the Fund [for responding to Loss and Damage] would require extraordinarily high resources to fulfil its function” (paras. 199–203).
The Court further advises states to adopt measures that integrate the fight against climate change and the protection of human rights to prevent the high level of indebtedness that states with fewer resources must resort to (para. 208). HIC-HLRN has observed this hazard in its series of Land Times/أحوال الأرض articles on the green transition of Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Tunisia and Yemen.
This Opinion will guide climate litigation at the local, regional, and national courts, and provide a foundation for climate policymaking, grounding local legislation and global negotiations in legal obligation, not just in the Americas, but around the world.
The UN’s International Court of Justice is expected to issue its Advisory Opinion on a similar legal question later this year.
For more details and documents, see IACtHR.
Photo: Pablo Saavedra Alessandri, secretary of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, speaking at the presentation of the Court’s Advisory Opinion on 2 July in San José, Costa Rica. Source: IACtHR.
| Themes |
| • Climate change • Destruction of habitat • Displacement • Environment (Sustainable) • Indigenous peoples • Legal frameworks • Norms and standards • Regional |
