¡Protection Starts at Home But does not Stop There! The Dynamics of the Human Rights Obligations of States for Protecting Environmentally Displaced Persons

Resumo

Environmental degradation and the effects of climate change have direct and indirect impacts on the effective enjoyment of human rights. Countries where the effects of environmental change and degradation occur are mostly likely to be vulnerable to human displacement, due to the lack of available adaptation resources, poor human resource implementation capacity and often a deficient human rights protection record. Such countries are also the ones least likely to proactively lobby governments at the national and international levels. While the exact number of people displaced is hard to estimate predictions are of approximately 150 million of environmentally displaced persons by 2050. This analysis starts by portraying the human impacts of environmental change, and then concentrates on the home states obligations under international human rights standards in parallel scrutiny with regional and international jurisprudence. The aim is to establish which duties home states have with regards to respecting human rights and ensuring a healthy and safe environment by avoiding environmental degradation. A further aim is to establish how states duties are transferable in the environmental change context; in particular, what protecting obligations states have towards environmentally displaced persons. This paper explores the duty of states to protect environmentally displaced people through a dynamic model of internalisation of protection obligations: respecting and fulfilling people’s needs in an interactive, international assistance, cooperative and participatory process. Ultimately, the global polity of states must find ways to deal with new legislative challenges in this current world of permanent emergencies of natural and human made environmental degradation and change.