Brazil: Human Rights and Environmental Refugees

Abstract

These notes seek to establish a discussion regarding the evolution of the refugee definition, particularly the so-called environmental refugees in the context of human rights and environmental law in order to establish possible proposals for the modification or extension of the concept, in the international treatise and in the Brazilian law, with regard to the issue of forced displacement in the contemporary world. The text aims to analyze the trajectory and the advancement of human rights in view of the category of refugees in Brazilian and international legislation in the context of new phenomena that challenges the current definition, like desertification, soil degradation, biodiversity loss and insecurity food, which can also cause displacement. These environmental phenomena have gained the centrality of the political debate of the world’s political agenda since the end of the Cold War until nowadays, since few times in history, there have been so many people moving from one country to another, from one continent to another, or even one region to another, fleeing from persecution or natural phenomena or lack of food.