Argentinian-court-cases
Stop experimenting on us! Judicial stories of pesticide resistance in Argentina
María Valeria Berros
2024
This paper focuses on two paradigmatic court decisions on pesticide spraying in Argentina’s agricultural zone and offers a socio-legal approach based primarily on legal sources. The first case was brought by a small town in the province of Santa Fe and the second involved the entire territory of the province of Entre Ríos, where more than a thousand rural schools are affected by the pesticide uses.
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Argentinian-court-cases
Una Corte Suprema con agenda verde
Carolina Piazzi, Cristian Fernández
2024
La Corte Suprema de Justicia de la Nación (Argentina) es uno de los altos tribunales a nivel internacional que ha asumido un liderazgo notable en materia de tutela del ambiente, proceso que se inició con la sentencia en la causa Riachuelo-Mendoza, que oficia de punto de partida del trabajo.
Este trabajo indaga en el perfil “verde” de la Suprema Corte a partir de variables tales como: la composición que adoptó la CSJN en los últimos años y el perfil ambiental de algunos de sus magistrados; disposiciones administrativas internas referidas a su interés por el ambiente; ciertos fallos de los últimos años referidos a la problemática ambiental, algunos de gran trascendencia pública, que contienen nuevas tendencias argumentativas. Para esto, se realiza un análisis documental, casuístico y comparativo de los fundamentos de las últimas sentencias de la CSJN sobre ambiente; se revisan los dispositivos administrativos creados con fines de organizar la tarea interna relativa a la temática ambiental; se recupera información sobre los perfiles académicos y políticos de los ministros de la Corte.
Las conclusiones apuntan a destacar que la Corte ha ingresado en la categoría de “Corte verde”, a partir de su composición y de un perfil especializado en Derecho Ambiental que viene construyendo desde, al menos, el 2008. Además, existe una conexión evidente entre la trayectoria académica de algunos magistrados y el activismo judicial en cuestiones socio-ambientales que ha caracterizado a la Corte en los últimos años.
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Argentinian-court-cases
You Cannot Have the Cake and Eat It – How to Reconcile Liberal Fundamental Rights with Answers to the Climate Crisis
Eva Julia Lohse, María Valeria Berros
2024
Our Western-style constitutional systems are not only built on 16th to 18th century social contract theory, but also mainly on a liberal understanding of individual human rights. They are an element of constitutions and international treaties and are increasingly used as a basis for claims of individuals against states for more action to tackle the climate change crisis. However, a human right to a sustainable climate meets plenty of challenges if understood as a classic human right. The question is whether human rights offer a solution to legal questions of the climate crisis by empowering people to demand specific measures from states. The authors demonstrate how the search for solutions has altered the understanding of human rights globally and will continue to do so. It sheds a light on whether the premises on the relationship between state and individual and burdens on individual freedom can still be answered by paradigms from social contract theories and whether the social contract needs to be enlarged by including non-human actors (like eco-systems) or future generations.
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Argentinian-court-cases
Climate Litigation in Argentina: A Critical and Prospective Analysis
Gastón Medici-Colombo, María Valeria Berros
2023
This article analyses the climate litigation scenario in Argentina. Based on the Sabin Center Database, we conducted an in-depth study of all the proceeding documents of the identified cases. We found that, in Argentina, a significant number of climate cases exists compared to other jurisdictions in the region and in the Global South as a whole. These cases show civil society actors suing public and corporate actors due to the deployment of ‘climate-disruptive’ projects or the failed protection of climate-relevant ecosystems. Plaintiffs use a variety of judicial avenues and grounds from different regulatory levels. That said, the case law study leads us to conclude that climate litigation is still incipient in Argentina. Climate change is a very novel legal issue for Argentinean litigants and courts, with lawsuits only developing actual climate argumentation very recently and with not even one judgment, let alone a landmark decision, addressing climate concerns. That is a notable difference from other jurisdictions in the region. Furthermore, we anticipate that climate litigation will continue to grow in Argentina, given weak political opportunities for climate action and stronger legal opportunities provided by broad judicial avenues, a multiplicity of grounds that can be used in climate arguments, and innovative environmental legal approaches developed by the Supreme Court.
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