Multilateralism Under Strain: Why the Human Rights Council Matters for Environmental Justice – Center for International Environmental Law

In a polarized geopolitical panorama, the Human Rights Council stays a vital platform for advancing environmental justice by means of norm-setting, accountability mechanisms, and civil society participation.

Printed March 23, 2026

By Francesca Mingrone, CIEL Human Rights and Local weather Change Senior Lawyer.

Multilateralism is below pressure. Heightened geopolitical tensions, democratic backsliding, and widening inequality have strained international cooperation simply as environmental degradation and local weather disruption intensify, jeopardizing elementary human rights inside and throughout borders and generations.

On this fractured panorama, the United Nations Human Rights Council (HRC) stays one of many few international boards the place environmental hurt is addressed explicitly as a human rights problem — and the place governments, civil society, and Indigenous Peoples can search accountability.

The three annual classes of the HRC are among the many key moments, each in Geneva and globally, for worldwide deliberation on human rights in a quickly altering world. As in each current session, its sixty-first session (HRC61, 23 February – 31 March 2026) brings collectively Member States, unbiased consultants, civil society actors, and Indigenous Peoples’ representatives to debate urgent international challenges, together with local weather change, environmental justice, company accountability, and the safety of human rights defenders.

The continuing session underscores each the urgency and the fragility of worldwide cooperation on human rights, particularly in opposition to the backdrop of a mounting liquidity and funding disaster that affects the United Nations (UN) and the broader worldwide human rights sector.

The Human Rights Council in a Fragmented International Order

Established in 2006 to switch the Fee on Human Rights, the HRC was designed to strengthen the effectiveness, credibility, and universality of the UN’s human rights structure. Its processes and mechanisms — together with thematic and country-specific resolutions, the Common Periodic Evaluate (UPR), the Particular Procedures, and the Advisory Committee — provide formal avenues for constructive scrutiny and engagement by States, civil society, and Indigenous Peoples.

Nevertheless, because the world turns into extra geopolitically divided, the Council’s work displays broader tensions amongst States. Voting patterns and positions on key points inside the HRC, together with gender equality, civil liberties, and environmental safety, are more and more polarized. The commitments taken in resolutions are sometimes watered down, and thematic mandates (referred to as Particular Procedures) are topic to elevated scrutiny and strain from States throughout their renewal.

Regardless of these pressures, the Council stays one of many key international establishments to advance environmental and local weather justice, because it continues to handle the triple planetary disaster — local weather change, biodiversity loss, and air pollution — explicitly by means of the lens of human rights. Framing environmental hurt as a human rights violation strengthens States’ authorized obligations. This strategy was reaffirmed by the Worldwide Court docket of Justice in its current advisory opinion (AO) on local weather change, which underscored how local weather change threatens legally protected human rights.

Transferring the Needle In the direction of Significant Environmental Democracy

The Human Rights Council has a vital norm-setting function. Through the years, it has helped advance the interpretation of States’ current human rights obligations. The formal recognition of the human proper to a clear, wholesome, and sustainable setting has been one of the Council’s most important normative breakthroughs. In October 2021, the Council acknowledged this proper, and, in July 2022, the UN’s highest deliberative physique, the Basic Meeting, echoed this improvement by recognizing this very proper in Decision 76/300. Such formidable outcomes had been made potential by the management of teams of nations – the so-called “core teams” and procedural guidelines that permit the HRC to cross resolutions by voting (versus by consensus, as utilized in some multilateral fora).

The work of the Human Rights Council has knowledgeable different multilateral fora, together with environmental ones. In 2008, HRC Decision 7/23 performed a key function in guaranteeing that human rights entered the United Nations Framework Conference on Local weather Change (UNFCCC), the place, from 2010 onward, States lastly began to handle the linkages between human rights and the local weather disaster. Equally, the combination of human rights concerns within the context of the International Biodiversity Framework wouldn’t have been potential with out the HRC’s wealth of related resolutions and Particular Procedures experiences (alongside the work of the Workplace of the Excessive Commissioner for Human Rights, which is usually mandated by the HRC to arrange experiences.) that related the triple planetary disaster to human rights impacts. 

The HRC’s Particular Procedures experiences additionally advance the understanding of environmental human rights points. These experiences doc human rights harms and supply info concerning related authorized obligations. Examples of noteworthy experiences embody the Particular Rapporteur on local weather’s report on fossil fuels, the Particular Rapporteur on the precise to a wholesome setting’s report on  Investor-State Dispute Settlement,  in addition to the Particular Rapporteurs on toxics and the precise to a wholesome setting’s joint report on “sacrifice zones”. 

Our Work on the Council

Through the years, the Middle for Worldwide Environmental Legislation (CIEL) has leveraged the HRC and its mechanisms to:

Bridge environmental legislation and human rights, 
Reinforce the nexus between environmental hurt, local weather change, and human rights violations,
Strengthening the case that States must be held accountable for inaction on local weather change, and that local weather measures have to be grounded in human rights.

There are three essential approaches CIEL makes use of to advance these aims.

1. Supporting Norm Improvement

CIEL’s authorized analysis and advocacy assist conceptualize environmental hurt inside the framework of established human rights obligations and ideas. This strategy strengthens the authorized coherence of environmental rights norms and ensures that Council discussions replicate each scientific proof and current authorized obligations of States.

CIEL actively participates within the plenary classes in addition to in negotiations on related resolutions, advocating for the inclusion of extra formidable parts and bridging the Council’s work with different related fora, such because the UNFCCC. 

2. Defending and Strengthening Particular Procedures

The Council’s Particular Procedures — unbiased mechanisms together with particular rapporteurs, unbiased consultants, and dealing teams — are amongst its most precious accountability instruments. Mandates akin to these on the precise to a wholesome setting, human rights defenders, and local weather change, present distinctive experience to proceed to bridge environmental legislation and human rights, and help States in advancing human rights-based local weather motion. CIEL works with companions to help Particular Procedures’ evidence-based experiences, defend the independence of mandate holders, and resist efforts to slender the scope of their mandate. These efforts assist protect one of many Council’s most unbiased, responsive, and versatile mechanisms for addressing rights violations and rising threats. A number of experiences by Particular Procedures, such because the abovementioned experiences, have considerably superior the understanding of environmental human rights points. 

3. Advancing Accountability for Company Conduct

The transnational nature of environmental harms — from fossil gas manufacturing and consumption to poisonous air pollution — poses vital governance and accountability challenges.

CIEL continues to have interaction in negotiations and discussions on enterprise and human rights to underscore each State and company obligations below worldwide legislation. This contains participation in ongoing negotiations on a legally binding instrument on transnational firms and different enterprise enterprises, and the availability of data for Particular Procedures’ communications to States and firms. Integrating company accountability into the multilateral human rights discourse is crucial for securing efficient prevention and safety for affected communities, in addition to treatments when hurt happens.

Public Participation and Institutional Legitimacy

One of many refreshing options of the Council’s work — together with the present session — is its broad house for civil society engagement in comparison with different multilateral processes. Whereas CIEL shouldn’t be itself a frontline group, its contributions are grounded in shut collaboration with affected communities and companions, whose experiences inform its advocacy. By means of oral statements, written submissions, and participation in plenary classes, CIEL helps deliver these views into the room, guaranteeing that deliberations are knowledgeable by the lived realities of frontline teams and communities.

At a time when civic house is shrinking throughout many nationwide and regional contexts, this engagement reinforces the legitimacy of multilateral processes and underscores the Council’s continued relevance as a number one international discussion board for the promotion and safety of human rights.

What’s on the Horizon?

From geopolitical polarization to institutional useful resource constraints, multilateralism is below pressure. But the weakening of cooperative frameworks would go away fewer avenues for accountability when they’re most wanted.

The Human Rights Council stays a significant platform for advancing environmental rights, defending defenders, and guaranteeing that local weather motion is grounded in human rights. Strengthening this discussion board — and the participation of civil society inside it — might be important as environmental crises deepen and the demand for accountability grows.

On this context, CIEL contributes actively to reinforcing, defending, and shaping multilateral norms by bridging international governance with the lived expertise of frontline communities and rigorous authorized experience.