Interrogating a Notable Silence: Human Rights and the Migration and Climate Change Nexus

This chapter looks at a silence that is surprising because it is well established in elite policy making of the United Nations and the international community broadly, backed up with legal documents, norms and accepted parlance, but which prior to and indeed during the Paris Conference of the Parties (COP) of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) remained on the margins of the policy-making discourse: human rights. Climate change and human rights are not unusual bedfellows, with academics drawing on the utility of human rights as an analytical approach to the societal effects of climate change, and the link also featuring frequently and prominently within UN fora. Against this background, it is notable that human rights does not have a more prominent position in the policy-making discourse on migration and climate change. For this analysis, it is important to stress that human rights is a relative silence in the policy-making discourse on the migration and climate change nexus. It is described as such because human rights do actually feature in the discourse and have been very much present in broader debates surrounding the nexus.