The Climate Displacement Gap: A Survey of Legal Options for the Protection of Individuals Displaced by Natural Disaster and Slow-Onset Climate Change

by Adina Appelbaum
Twitter: @abappelbaum


Source: © Reuters/Adrees Latif

Crisis after crisis, natural and climate change-related disasters such as floods, droughts, and storms have displaced people from their homes in countries around the world. Though a causal link between any weather event and climate change is difficult to prove, climatologists have long believed that climate change will result in an increase in extreme weather events. Floods, droughts, and storms almost always impact the lives of individuals, forcing them to flee their homes as a result of safety or reduced food supply, among other factors. In 2005 for example, Hurricane Katrina left a wake of more than 400,000 displaced residents. In 2010, over 20 million people were affected, and 8 million displaced, by the floods in Pakistan. In addition to these more immediate natural disasters, slow-onset climate change-related disasters such as drought, desertification, salination of groundwater, and the rise of sea levels have contributed to massive displacement worldwide. Decreased agricultural output and the collapse of fisheries have also been indirectly linked to climate change. For example, slow-onset climate change in the Sahel, namely erratic rainfall, combined with high food prices, led to a food crisis in 2012 that left 18 million people without sufficient food and put one million children at risk of starvation.

Connection to Human Rights

Climate displacement implicates human rights by threatening lives, food security, livelihoods, water access, health, and safety, among other critical needs. Women, children, and other vulnerable populations are often disproportionately affected. Additionally, underlying factors such as poverty, social injustice, and weak government capacity to respond greatly exacerbate a country’s ability to prevent displacement and protect those who become displaced, once vulnerable to climate change. In the Sahel and the Horn of Africa, for example, incredible rates of poverty and weak human rights institutions have intensified the impacts of climate change exposure. The 2010 Pakistan floods particularly demonstrated need for better international human rights transparency, institutions, and monitoring, and the creation of mechanisms that allow for the resolution of human rights issues in the context of climate displacement. In this light, the challenges of climate displacement must be seen as implicating existing human rights instruments such as the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR)  and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), in addition to new frameworks.

Climate displacement can be a means to work with governments to strengthen their human rights institutions and commitments: it may be easier to advocate for human rights to governments in terms of climate change rather than political upheavals. One option is to encourage countries to incorporate human rights standards into natural disaster law and policies. For example, Daniel Petz, Senior Research Assistant on Natural Disasters of the Brookings-LSE Project on Internal Displacement has worked with various governmental disaster managers to incorporate the IASC Operational Guidelines on the Protection of Persons in Situations of Natural Disasters in national disaster law and policies, which promote and facilitate a rights-based approach to disaster relief.

Italy Attempts to “Push-back” its International Human Rights Duties

by Lauren Esterle

“No contracting state shall expel or return (refouler) a refugee in any manner whatsoever to the frontiers of territories where his life or freedom would be threatened on account of his race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political opinion.”  -  Art. 33 of the UN Refugee Convention

Enshrined in the 1951 Refugee Convention and considered a rule of customary international law, the principle of non-refoulement is an essential component of asylum and international refugee protection that safeguards migrants, whatever their status, from forcible return to countries where they may be exposed to persecution. In recent years, however, the principle has faced barriers as States have attempted to deal with increasing migration flows by intercepting vessels on the high seas and preventing them from reaching their destinations.  This process, sometimes aided by bilateral agreements between individual countries, places the principle of non-refoulement at risk if migrants onboard are not first individually screened for refugee status. Furthermore, the location of these interceptions, on the high seas or territorial waters, has influenced States’ opinions of how, if and when they should be held accountable for violations of their obligations under international law.

The European Court of Human Rights highlighted this problem in its 2012 decision Hirsi v. Italy, which examined a 2009 incident where the Italian coastguard intercepted approximately 200 migrants thirty-five nautical miles south of Lampedusa, Italy (on the high seas) and returned them to Tripoli without ever informing the migrants of their final destination or screening the group for possible asylum seekers. The Court noted that the Italian Minister of the Interior had stated that the operation was an effective push-back policy resulting from 2009 bilateral “friendship” agreements concluded with Libya. Although the case only dealt with an operation led by Italy, the agreements referenced by the Minister also alluded to organized joint patrolling operations by mixed crews of Libyans and Italians, on ships supplied by Italy in both international and Libyan territorial waters.  

Redisplacing the displaced in Haiti

 

flikr, Lee Cohen

By Elizabeth Gibson

When the police arrived at Haiti’s Camp Django this summer, they started negotiations by offering money to anyone willing to relocate. It went downhill from there.

                 

When earthquake refugees told the police that $125 each was not enough to find new shelter, the police grew more forceful. A man was knocked to the ground, a woman beaten. Panic set in.

“Everyone started running, so I did too, until I was out of the camp. I later called home and learned that the police broke into my shelter and kicked out my seven-year-old son,” one camp resident described.