Systemic integration between climate change and human rights at the United Nations?

Abstract

The UN has been active in the field of climate change for a long time through several organs, speciflcally UNEP. Its action led to the adoption of fundamental instruments in the field. The key convention in the matter is the UNFCCC, which was adopted in 1992 at the end of the Rio Earth Summit. The UNFCCC entered into force on 21 March 1994 and currently includes 196 parties. Initially, the UN took an environmental approach to climate change, excluding human rights. However, things changed with the adoption of the Malé Declaration on the Human Dimension of Global Climate Change, which was endorsed by Small Island States in 2007. Indeed, the Declaration prompted the UN to integrate human rights in the climate change discourse, on the one hand, within the context of the UNFCCC, and, on the other, through classical UN human rights bodies, that is, Charter-based bodies and treaty bodies, particularly the HRCte. Only recently therefore has the UN taken a stand on the relationship between climate change and human rights and work is still in progress.