Escaping Atlantis: The Human Rights Approach (Part II)

This article is Part II of an investigative series about climate migration. For Part I of Escaping Atlantis, click here.

The human rights approach directly confronts the impact of environmental degradation on vulnerable individuals. This anthropocentric, bottom-up discourse actively represents climate migrants, emphasizing their loss of property, culture, status, and dignity.

These principles encapsulate the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), a key binding treaty of basic rights all humans must enjoy. Losing these rights submerges climate migrants below the minimum conditions to a dignified life.

Under the human rights approach, countries have international responsibilities to preserve these fundamental rights. The current international human rights law primarily pledges states to protect the basic rights of individuals within their territory and jurisdiction. Any state that exercises authority or effective control over an individual is responsible for guaranteeing the fundamental rights of the individual.

The principal benefits of the human rights approach are its universality and representation. Human rights are an internationally agreed upon expression that applies to all people.

All migrants are entitled to human rights protection, regardless of their migration status or the migration policy of their state. With direct engagement within political disputes, individuals enjoy greater legal capacity and representation.

Subsequently, any favorable international human rights outcome for climate migrants benefits all vulnerable populations. This all-encompassing human rights umbrella provides the legal basis for displaced individuals to challenge a state for human rights violations. If coordinated relocation occurs, this legal structure provides minimum standards of treatment that the host state must follow.

Through this direct representation, climate migrants have stronger advocacy for their rights.

One common obstacle for climate migrant advocacy is the burden of proof. Numerous natural and man-made drivers contribute to displacement. Demonstrating a causal relationship between the actions of a country and the adverse climate effects of a different country has proven futile.

The 2007 Inuit petition to the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR) attempted to connect the United States' GHG emissions to the adverse climate change harming their Alaskan and Canadian communities. The IACHR dismissed the petition because the plaintiffs could not sufficiently demonstrate a direct causal link between U.S. pollution and Inuit environmental degradation.

Researchers and courts cannot delineate personal responsibility when environmental disasters involve numerous outside parties and natural phenomena. No single entity is completely responsible for any particular environmental disaster.

The human rights perspective recognizes that correlating pollution and displacement across transnational boundaries is unfeasible. To circumvent this impossibility, the human rights approach explores other avenues of human rights abuse. These pathways identify state-sponsored actions and egregious deprivation that may constitute human rights violations.

This framework is not concerned with the origins of displacement. The perspective centers on the violation of fundamental rights, focusing on the vulnerability of displaced individuals. In the context of environmental degradation, vulnerability constitutes the capacity to absorb impacts without significant disruption. Thus, a greatly disrupted population should demonstrate a level of vulnerability that merits migrant protection.

By focusing on the vulnerability of human rights violations, the complex arguments about the primary cause of environmental displacement are avoided. Evading climate change debates that undermine the struggles of migrants is beneficial for the progression of human rights protection.

Vulnerability assessment is easier to translate into other litigation than displacement causation. If an international case can establish a threshold of vulnerability, its precedent is universally applicable to other climate migrant litigation.

The human rights framework prioritizes the prevention and remedy of human rights violation, shifting the focus away from the origins of displacement.

Similarly, the universality diminishes the need to distinguish the diverse causes of migration. Environmental displacement is a single component among a multitude of factors that compel migration, including political terror, domestic violence, population growth, economic opportunity, social benefits, religious experience, and retirement.

In a survey of 60 Kiribati households, only 53% of respondents who planned to migrate in the future cited environmental conditions as a reason for their migration. Other factors cited by the respondents include employment (18.9%), family reunion (15.9%), and education (7.6%).

This Migration Matters video demonstrates the straining difficulty of categorizing different scenarios of migration.

Under the human rights approach, differentiating forms of migration is typically inconsequential when everyone is eligible for human rights protection. Addressing the vulnerability and infringement on human rights supersedes delineating the drivers of displacement and migration.

While distinguishing types of migration is generally inessential under the human rights approach, one exception pertains to slow on-set disasters. Displacement caused by foreseeable yet gradual events - sea level rise, soil erosion, ocean acidification - may cause citizens to migrate to avoid greater environmental harm.

If a migrant leaves before the projecting cataclysmic disaster, their decision is arguably non-compulsory. Since no serious force has struck, human rights law views this movement as voluntary migration.

This distinction is typically unnecessary since human rights protection presents universal coverage. However, a prerequisite to human rights protection is a clear distinction of force. Leaving prior to the demonstration of force may exempt a migrant from protection. To secure human rights protection, an applicant must demonstrate a genuine risk of serious harm.

As long as a demonstrable force of severe magnitude is established, the multidimensional classification of migrants does not matter. If a migrant successfully argues their human rights violation, this framework guarantees their protection.

However, if the different forms of migration are inconsequential under this framework, why distinguish climate migrants at all?

Climate migration is distinct from other forms of migration because of the certainty of permanent territory loss. Climate migrants, particularly displaced inhabitants of low-lying areas, must escape regions that will entirely disappear or become irrevocably inhospitable.

Current international convention on the protection for displaced individuals assumes that migrants could return to their state of origin once their homeland recovers. Human rights migration is spurred by escaping state-sponsored abuse, such as violent conflict, oppressive persecution, or administrative breakdown. Migration spurred by island disappearance is an escape from the absence of physical territory.

No amount of humility, repentance, and prayer can heal the land that no longer exists.

The human rights approach is theoretically empowered to rescue climate migrants from the oncoming wrath of climate change.

• To view a summary of the 2007 Inuit decision, read Gordon
• To hear more from Sheila Watt Cloutier, read her IACHR testimony
• For a contrasting perspective on migration multicausality, read Tertrais
• For further sources, visit the Recommended Reading Folder

To view this investigative series with complete academic citations and references, visit my academic paper here.

For Part III of Escaping Atlantis, click here.