Trial lecture - time and place
Adjudication committee
- Professor Ingunn Ikdahl, Universitety of Oslo (leader)
- Professor Erin Daly, Widener University (1. opponent)
- Professor Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos, University of Westminster (2.opponent)
Chair of defence
Supervisors
Summary
Over the past few decades, the concept of human dignity has come to play a central role in the judicial reasoning of judges presiding over human rights cases. In a range of jurisdictions, courts have found that dignity is the foundation of human rights, or that dignity is the source of human rights, or that dignity is the concept through which other rights ought to be interpreted. Judges, at the domestic and international level, have relied on the concept of dignity in their interpretation and application of rights to life, to equality, to housing, to privacy, to work, to land, to health, and to justice, among many others.
Are environmental rights also dignity rights?
While dignity is a concept often seen to be at the heart of all of our rights, little consideration has been given to dignity’s role or significance in respect of environmental rights and environmental threats to human rights. Today we face new, global threats to the realisation of rights as a result of severe environmental degradation and depleted reserves of essential natural resources. We also have a more sophisticated understanding of the ways in which our rights depend on and are connected to the environment. In this study I ask whether dignity has any role to play in addressing these new threats and in securing environmental rights and greater environmental care.
In exploring these questions, I take a pragmatist approach to understanding dignity’s meaning, role and potential in human rights law. As a result of this approach, I find that dignity is a multifaceted and continually evolving concept. In examining dignity case law, I find a concept that speaks to social and individual constructions of identity, and a concept deeply concerned with the relational character of our humanness. This, I suggest, means we can utilise dignity as a concept through which we might recognise our own humanness as constituted not only in relation to self and others, but also in relation to the environment. In short, dignity extends our understanding of our environmental impacts and duties, while our reliance on and relatedness to the environment extends our understanding of our dignity.
Dignity, indgenous land and future generations
I consider dignity’s roles and potential in the context of two critical environmental problems. The first is the problem of addressing competing interests in land and resources in circumstances when parties claim a special connection to particular territory. One finds many examples of these sorts of cases in the indigenous rights jurisprudence of the Inter-American Court and Commission. Looking at a few examples of these cases, I argue that the Court and Commission have sought to protect indigenous rights under the right to property but have failed to adequately protect claims to an environmental identity. I argue that we find in dignity jurisprudence an understanding of identity that the Inter-American system might adopt in their reasoning to better protect the interests at stake in indigenous claims.
The second problem I consider is the problem of temporality in human rights law. The impacts of environmental degradation may reach far into the future, threatening future generations and the continued functioning of ecological systems. Again, I find that dignity offers new insights into these problems, giving courts a tool with which to reason towards better environmental ends. Through an environmental interpretation of our dignity, courts can extend our human rights practice to better protect our humanness, our environments and our future. The concept of dignity, I find, may help us recognise questions about the nature and purpose of human rights as environmental questions, concerned with our understanding of ourselves in the world, and our aspirations for the future we hope to build.