Human Rights Lunch Online: Rights of future generations - questions of law, politics and morality

In international human rights law, the subject, or 'beneficiary', of a human right is usually thought of as a born and living person, a current individual human being. That said, human rights law does recognise the category of collective peoples' rights, as well as the concept of human dignity that represents a universal value underlying a whole range of specific human rights of individuals. In moral philosophy, some authors are prepared to widen the scope of subjects of rights, while some others only attribute rights to persons with active agency, prepared to deny human rights to small children or persons with severe disabilities. The ongoing climate crisis has resulted in increased attention to the question whether future generations, as individuals or collectively, have human rights that have consequences in terms of law, morality or politics. Both the UN Human Rights Committee case of indigenous Torres Strait Islanders (Daniel Billy et al. v. Australia) and the European Court of Human Rights case of an association of senior Swiss ladies (Klima Seniorinnen v. Switzerland) came to rely on the notion of rights of future generations in establishing that the two states in question were in breach of their legally binding human rights obligations.

Martin Scheinin is an international law scholar and served as the first United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism in 2005–2011. He was selected for this position after serving for eight years (1997–2004) as member of the United Nations Human Rights Committee. Today, Martin is Guest Professor at Lund University's Faculty of Law, and remains a part-time professor of International Law and Human Rights at the European University Institute in Florence, Italy.