human rights

The Power of Rights-Based Climate Change Litigation

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My law review article exploring the influence and impact of rights-based climate change litigation has now been published in the Case Western Reserve Journal of International Law, and the full article can be downloaded from SSRN. The abstract is posted below:

An increasing number of legal challenges to government climate change policies are being advanced on the basis that states are violating the human rights or constitutional rights of applicants. A number of high-profile cases in Europe have upheld such claims and ordered governments to adjust their policies. But questions remain regarding how effective such rights-based cases may be in the effort to enforce climate change law obligations or encourage government responses to the crisis. This Article explores how such rights-based cases may exercise greater influence than is typically understood.

After explaining briefly the relevant human rights and climate change law, this Article examines in some detail a sample of rights-based climate cases that reflect a common pattern of features that provide the basis for such an explanation. The cases illustrate the incorporation of both international human rights law norms, and international climate change law obligations and standards, which are used to assess the legitimacy of government climate change policy. The courts increasingly rely upon the science of climate change institutions and the arguments and doctrines developed by foreign courts and international tribunals, including new doctrines for rejecting typical “drop in the ocean” causation and justiciability arguments traditionally relied upon to dismiss climate change cases.

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Senate Testimony on Economic Sanctions

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I was invited to testify before the Senate of Canada, Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs, on issues relating to two pieces of legislation that form part of Canada’s economic sanctions laws. The full testimony can be found here (commencing half way through the full session), and a couple of clips of my answers to questions on the effectiveness of economic sanctions, and the lawfulness of secondary sanctions, were posted to YouTube by Senator Woo, and can be found here, and here. I was invited to testify in light of my report Economic Sanctions Under International Law: A Guide for Canadian Policy, published in 2021.

Why Canada Should Rethink its Approach to Economic Sanctions

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(Published in The Conversation, Mar. 6, 2022)

Western countries have imposed massive sanctions against Russia for its invasion of Ukraine. The West has increasingly relied on economic sanctions to punish or change the policies of foreign governments in the last several decades. The conventional wisdom is that economic sanctions are an effective and peaceful foreign policy tool.

Some sanctions regimes, such as the current effort against Russia, may be both effective and lawful. But as I explored in a recent research report, some economic sanctions may violate international law principles, including those the sanctions are intended to enforce. They may therefore undermine the very legal regimes that Canadians like to champion.

The nature of economic sanctions

Many economic sanctions are authorized by the United Nations Security Council or regional organizations. But countries are increasingly imposing sanctions without such legal authority. It’s these so-called unilateral or autonomous sanctions that raise legal questions.

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Canada’s Not Back Yet: Debating Canada’s Place in the World

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(Published in A Blog Called Intrepid, Jul. 27, 2020).

Canada’s failure to win a seat in the United Nations Security Council has provoked a debate over Canada’s place in the world. It was seen as a personal failure of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who when elected famously declared that “Canada is back!” But it has raised deeper questions regarding the reasons for the failure, what Canada’s role in the world should be, and indeed what it once was—should we want to be “back?” And what does that mean anyway?

Some have suggested that the past that Trudeau invoked is more myth than fact, and that we should, in any event, look to the future with a more narrowly pragmatic and realpolitik approach. But the soft power and outsized diplomatic influence that Canada wielded during the latter half of the Twentieth Century is no myth—and I would argue it is important to understand what explained Canada’s stature in the world, and indeed to get “back” to embracing the principles that made us who we then were. Those principles are closer to the values that still make us who we are today as a nation.

I personally witnessed evidence of this influence in the autumn of 1989. I was a junior naval attaché seconded to serve in the Canadian Mission to the United Nations in New York City. Joe Clark, then the Minister of External Affairs in the Mulroney government, was to address the General Assembly at the end of September, and Canada was to take over the rotating presidency of the Security Council in October. It was an exciting time to be at the UN, as the Berlin Wall was coming down and there were other seismic shifts suggesting a coming new world order. But like most members of Canada’s then under-funded military, I shared the perspective that Canada’s anemic hard power gave it little influence in the world.

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