The Inter-American System is one of the unique and most influential features of Latin American International Law in the 21st century. Now the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, alongside its fellow international courts, is being called to weigh in on the most intractable issue of our time: climate change. What will it be able to offer? This chapter argues that the Inter-American System’s legacy of confronting structural injustice will allow the Court to play a unique but limited role in the emerging international climate docket. The Court could have the most impact through its climate docket if it were to adjudicate with an eye to its comparative advantages. Specifically, the Court should utilize the strengths of its jurisprudence on structural injustice to articulate state obligations regarding adaptation and the protection of the most vulnerable groups. It would thereby provide social movements discursive tools with which to advance their causes at the national and international levels as the climate becomes more unstable. Simultaneously, the Court should reinforce what will be the other international courts’ (likely) emphasis on mitigation of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by drawing on its ground-breaking jurisprudence on state obligations to prevent human rights violations. In this way, it may be able to push states toward greater compliance and more ambitious mitigation goals. The Court will be on weakest grounds, substantively and politically, if it turns to questions of climate justice between states. These questions have been at the heart of international climate law and continue to stymie progress on states’ commitments to mitigation, and there will be pressure for the Inter-American Court to step in. But it should show restraint.
Bibliographic Citation
Alexandra Huneeus, Can the Inter-American Court Tip Us toward Climate Justice?, in Latin American International Law in the Twenty-First Century (Alejandro Chehtman, Alexandra Huneeus and Sergio Puig, eds. 2025).
