Rodrigo da Costa Sales
The IACtHR establishes that States have a series of obligations to ensure a healthy environment and climate, and prevent violations of human rights. To this end, the IACtHR develops the standard of enhanced due diligence as a binding framework for State action. This standard includes elements aimed at ensuring that the response to climate change is effective, fair, transparent, and evidence-based (para. 224). This blog post discusses the heightened due diligence standard, as clarified by the IACtHR, and outlines nine key elements of this standard.
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Sarah Dorman, Monica Iyer, Kelsey Jost-Creegan
Corporations, especially those engaged in fossil fuel production, agriculture, construction, and transportation, play a significant role in the climate crisis and in its human rights impacts. It is thus of critical importance that the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR)’s Advisory Opinion 32/25 (AO-32/25) not only directly addresses corporate climate and human rights impacts, but also provides some pathways forward on these persistent barriers to accountability. This blog discusses AO-32/25’s holdings and innovations as related to business and human rights and reflects on their broader legal implications.
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Verena Kahl, José Daniel Rodríguez-Orúe
On July 3, 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) issued its long-awaited Advisory Opinion No. 32 (AO-32/25) on the “Climate Emergency and Human Rights”. With its opinion, the IACtHR became the first human rights monitoring body to recognize that a healthy climate is an autonomous and justiciable human right. This blog post traces the emergence of this new right within the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS) and highlights its most transformative elements for theory and practice.
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Armando Rocha, Maria Antonia Tigre, Miriam Cohen
With AO-32/25, the IACtHR has delivered a historic and bold affirmation that climate change is not only an environmental emergency but also a profound human rights crisis, one that requires both prevention and reparation. By articulating States’ duties to provide remedies, the IACtHR has moved the conversation to one of legal accountability and remediation.
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Paulina Macías Ortega, Fabiola Gretzinger
On July 3, 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) published its long-awaited Advisory Opinion 32/25 (AO-32/25). The Opinion responds to a 2023 request from Colombia and Chile, asking the IACtHR to clarify the scope of States’ obligations to address the climate emergency under international human rights law. While the decision marks a significant step toward recognizing the climate crisis as a human rights issue, this blog post aims to shed light on a critical omission in the IACtHR’s reasoning: the impact of environmental degradation and the climate emergency on sexual and reproductive health and rights.
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Ecab Amor Vázquez, Theresa Amor-Jürgenssen
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ (IACtHR) advisory opinion on human rights and the climate emergency (AO-32/25) addresses numerous dimensions of the climate crisis, setting an important precedent for the protection of our planet. This post focuses on one particularly significant development: the IACtHR’s recognition of Nature as a subject of rights. We argue that the IACtHR’s pronouncements on this subject mark the advent of an ecocentric paradigm whose implications are likely to be far-reaching and transformative.
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Maria Antonia Tigre, Dina Lupin, Natalia Urzola Gutiérrez
This post focuses on one notable aspect of AO-32/25 that has not received attention in other commentary–the IACtHR’s engagement with gender issues. We find that the IACtHR has taken an important step forward, both in recognizing gender as a key determinant of climate vulnerability and in identifying gender-responsive obligations on States. However, the IACtHR’s comments in this regard remain general and often gestural. The obligations identified are limited, narrow, and many relate to data gathering rather than substantial action.
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Markus Gehring
While there are many aspects of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR)’s Advisory Opinion 32/25 (AO-32/25) that are new and groundbreaking, the inclusion of a reflection on jus cogens might have surprised some observers. The legal consequences of the recognition as jus cogens of the obligation not to create irreversible damage to the climate and the global environment are profound. Treaties violating the norm are void, customary international law rules cannot exist, nor does the persistent objector rule apply.
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David R. Boyd
The right to a healthy environment is at the heart of the landmark Advisory Opinion 32/25 (AO-32/25) on the climate emergency from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR). AO-32/25 marks the clearest ruling to date from an international court on the urgency of transformative changes to address the existential threat of the planetary environmental emergency caused by human activities.
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Lena Riemer, Luca Scheid
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights’ (IACtHR) Advisory Opinion OC-32/25 on the “Climate Emergency and Human Rights” represents a transformative moment in international legal doctrine on climate-induced displacement and shows why the IACtHR’s conclusions constitute not merely an incremental development, but a fundamental reorientation of the human rights law approach to one of the most pressing challenges of our time.
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Maria Antonia Tigre, Maxim Bönnemann, Korey Silverman-Roati
On July 3, 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) issued Advisory Opinion No. 32—the most important and progressive document yet released by an international court on the climate crisis. The IACtHR’s findings are as comprehensive as they are groundbreaking, spanning areas from procedural requirements for mitigation measures to the protection of environmental defenders. This post launches a blog symposium on the advisory opinion and discusses ten key takeaways, chosen to illustrate the opinion’s legal and practical significance.
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