Hubert: The Human Right to Science and its Relationship to International Environmental Law

Anna-Maria Hubert (Univ. of Calgary - Law) has posted The Human Right to Science and its Relationship to International Environmental Law (European Journal of International Law, forthcoming). Here's the abstract:

This article explores the potential contribution of international human rights law – specifically, the oft-neglected ‘right to science’ – to the interpretation, operation, and progressive development of international environmental law. Science and its applications play a critical role in environmental protection. At the same time, society faces persistent controversies at this interface. Environmental regimes may lack sufficient norms and tools for regulating upstream science and innovation processes, because they tend to focus narrowly on physical harms to environment, and may not address the wider ethical, legal, and social, and political concerns. The human right to science, which is codified in various international and regional human rights instruments, may serve to augment international environmental law, and contribute to more effective, equitable, and democratically legitimate, and accountable processes and outcomes in relation to the application science and technology in environmental regimes. The article begins by outlining the scope and contents of, as well as limitations on, the right to science, focusing on Article 15(1)(b) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and its overlaps norms of international environmental law. It then analyses of the ways in which the right to science may influence the development of international environmental law by elucidating mechanisms for the integration of a human rights perspective in science and technology, and by outlining its potential substantive contributions to the development of international environmental law.