Suing the State for Climate Change (and holding it to account?)

How do courts around the world hold governments accountable for their failure to mitigate or adapt to climate change? Climate change is a complex global problem and poses a unique challenge for societies and for the law. As part of a manifold set of strategies to advance transformations, stakeholders are increasingly turning to litigation. When local courts address the role of a particular government on this issue, they become courts not only for their national jurisdiction but for the global population and the globe itself. Through content analysis of court cases against governments around the world, Catalina Vallejo has studied how courts are dealing with unprecedented issues of state responsibility for global harms, and whether the jurisprudence is responding to the unique nature of the climate problem. 

Catalina Vallejo is a lawyer and scholar from Colombia, with a special focus on public interest law, peace studies, and the environment. She holds a doctoral degree in law from Los Andes University in Bogotá, and in her dissertation Catalina focused on the jurisprudence of climate change. She is also a member of the unit on Natural Resources and Climate Lawfare at the Center on Law and Social Transformation, where she has worked on research projects on climate change and the human right to water. Before focusing on research, she worked three years as a lawyer in the public sector in Colombia (2006-9), in projects related to human rights education and urban planning.

The seminar is open to all interested!

Lunch will be served, so please let us know if you are coming by sending an e-mail to johan.elfving@uib.no