Balancing Climate, Culture and Human Rights: Insights from La Oroya, Fosen and the Torres Strait Islanders Case

As climate change accelerates, humans will need to take increasingly ambitious measures to mitigate its effects. These measures may protect human rights, ensuring people are safe from natural disasters, food insecurity and extreme temperatures, but they also have the capacity to infringe upon human rights. Balancing these interests is a growing challenge for the law, and has recently been the subject of groundbreaking jurisprudence in several international forums. This article examines the challenges of balancing human rights and climate action in the frame of two key human rights – the right to culture, and the right to a healthy environment – drawing lessons from the recent La Oroya Case from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights, the Torres Strait Islanders Case from the UN Human Rights Committee, and the Fosen Case from the Norwegian Supreme Court.