Struggling with Climate Change: Environmental Rights as Children’s Rights and the Potential of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child

Abstract

Children are the least responsible for climate change, yet they will bear the greatest burden of its impact, and even if children have not been entirely neglected in environmental treaties, a comprehensive regime that extends environmental human rights to them is still absent. However, the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC), which is the most ratified human rights instrument, is dedicated to children’s rights and is unique in specifically referring to the dangers and risks of environmental pollution. Based on this premise, this article contends that the CRC monitoring body has a unique institutional potential to interpret environmental law from a children’s rights-based perspective contributing to fighting climate change. A positive trend is evidently manifested in the General Comments and Concluding Observations that are moving from indirect considerations to explicit mainstreaming of climate change issues and related obligations. Following the entry into force of the Optional Protocol on a Communications Procedure (OPCP), which recognises that children have the right to appeal to an international mechanism specific to them, when national mechanisms fail to address violations effectively; the pending individual communication also promises to be historic in its scale of attempting to hold multiple countries simultaneously accountable for obligations under the CRC related to climate change. It is argued that a systemic integration of the Paris Agreement and the UNFCCC within the CRC context – as relevant rules of international law according to Article 31‍(3)(c) of the Vienna Convention – would ‘operationalise’ and make ‘justiciable’ those international environmental standards relevant to the substantive obligations under the CRC.