Part II - Conflict Mediation through Universalisation

Summary

This second part delves into concrete cases of conflicts between environmental protection and human rights decided by regional human rights courts. Instead of focusing on the outcomes of each case, the analysis attends to the legal reasoning and justifications articulated by judges when decisions are reached, and courts come to a resolution of adversarial argumentations. How do regional human rights courts balance individual or collective human rights against the interest in environmental protection, when environmental protection and human rights collide? What emerges is a process where parties counter legal indeterminacy by granting weight to specific legal, political and normative goals in an idiom of universality – namely through justifications in the name of ‘universal interests’ or ‘universal truth claims’. Two strategies of ‘universal justification’ are induced from the cases. First, conflicts between environmental protection and human rights tend to be solved though a ‘universalisation strategy’ that rests on an invocation of the ‘general interest’. Second, a ‘universalisation strategy’ is visible when courts settle disputes by relying on the ‘objectivity’ and ‘authority’ provided by scientific or human rights experts. New argumentative dynamics are induced from a critical case-law analysis that reveals particular understandings of the human–environment relation, which engenders specific world-making effects.