Environmental-law
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.
Click here for the full article
Environmental-law
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.
Click here for the full article
Environmental-law
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.
Click here for the full article
