Part 1: Climate Change on Trial: Mobilizing Human Rights to Accelerate Climate Action

This video explains why the July 2025 advisory opinions of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights and the International Court of Justice matter for rights-based climate litigation. Rodríguez-Garavito traces the field’s development from an early Inuit climate petition to international courts’ detailed examination of States’ climate obligations. He considers what the opinions clarify about human rights, environmental protection, scientific evidence, and legal accountability.

The video offers a brief history of the “rights turn” in climate litigation, then examines the principal contributions of each 2025 opinion. It covers the right to a healthy climate, the protection of Nature, corporate regulation, adaptation, the role of climate science in identifying State duties, and the possibility of reparations. It closes by considering how advocates may use the opinions in future cases and climate policy.

The petition illustrates how much the legal field has changed. Inuit leaders and their lawyers argued that the United States’ contribution to global warming violated their human rights, but the Inter-American Commission did not take the case forward. Rodríguez-Garavito uses that early effort to show how sustained litigation and advocacy helped make climate change a question that human rights courts now address directly.

The Court recognized a right to a healthy climate derived from the right to a healthy environment and connected its protection to the interests of present and future generations. The video also examines the opinion’s treatment of Nature and the ecological processes that sustain life. Rodríguez-Garavito presents these developments as part of a broader shift toward understanding human rights and the health of ecosystems together.

The opinion sets out duties for States to regulate business conduct contributing to climate change, including measures concerning emissions disclosure, due diligence, and greenwashing. It also gives substantial attention to adaptation: States must address climate impacts already affecting people and ecosystems while avoiding measures that create new vulnerabilities or environmental harm. The video highlights both subjects as areas that earlier rights-based climate cases had addressed less fully.

The ICJ examined obligations arising under several areas of international law, including climate treaties, human rights law, the law of the sea, and customary international law. It treated IPCC reports as a leading source of the best available science on climate change. As the video explains, scientific evidence helps give content to legal duties, including the assessment of risks and the measures States must take to protect the climate system.

No. The ICJ did not decide that a particular State had breached its obligations or order it to pay compensation. It explained that a State responsible for an internationally wrongful act may owe reparation for harm caused by that breach. A future claim would still need to establish the relevant breach, damage, and causal connection. The video discusses this framework as a potential avenue for climate justice.

Part 1 offers an accessible entry point for lawyers, students, advocates, researchers, and policymakers seeking to understand the two opinions together. It may be especially useful to people developing climate claims, evaluating government duties, or working with communities affected by climate change. The video also shows how Indigenous leaders, youth organizers, and other civil society actors helped shape the legal questions now before international courts.