Learning from Each Other
The relationship between the world's regional human rights courts has undergone a quiet but consequential transformation over the past decade. What began as occasional, informal exchanges among judges and registries — encounters at conferences, the mutual citation of landmark judgments, coordinated submissions to United Nations human rights bodies — has matured into something more deliberate and structurally significant. This blog post examines that transformation from the perspective of the Inter-American Court by attending closely to the three dimensions in which cooperation actually operates.
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Climate Justice Unlocked
The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has just handed climate litigators in Latin America the most powerful tool they have ever had. Advisory Opinion OC-32/25 restructures the procedural architecture of climate litigation: inverting burdens of proof, authorising the presumption of causal links between state emissions and climate harm, and recognising satellite imagery as evidence that states must make accessible to victims. For organisations that have spent years fighting for communities on the front lines of the climate emergency, this is a transformative moment.
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From Awas Tingni to Advisory Opinion 32/25
In July 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued Advisory Opinion 32/25 on the Climate Emergency and Human Rights: it recognized the right to a healthy climate as a standalone human right, declared a jus cogens norm prohibiting irreversible environmental harm, and affirmed the legal personhood of nature. These are not incremental developments. They are structural shifts in international environmental law, and they are the culmination of more than two decades of jurisprudential construction. This post traces that arc.
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Climate Change and the Environment at the Inter-American Court of Human Rights
The relationship between climate change and human rights has occupied international legal scholarship for more than two decades. Yet for much of that period, the relationship remained largely aspirational — acknowledged in soft-law instruments and scholarly commentary, but only partially operationalized by binding international adjudication. Advisory Opinion OC-32/25, adopted by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR or the Court) on May 29, 2025, marks a decisive shift in that landscape.
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