Is climate change a human rights violation?

This debate considers whether climate change is a human rights violation and introduces students to normative political theory and the international human rights law (HRL) framework. Catriona McKinnon argues that climate change is already damaging a morally fundamental subset of human rights and will continue to do so in the future. All persons, present and future, have basic rights to subsistence and security and this generates a general duty for all people to work to create and support rights-respecting institutions.
Marie-Catherine Petersmann challenges this position by highlighting the difficulties of
applying the HRL framework to climate change which, by its very nature, is a collective
action problem that cannot easily be linked to one duty bearer and one victim. Instead, she draws upon new insights from environmental humanities to offer a different way of thinking about co-responsible agents and beneficiaries of a stable climate.