About this Event
The United Nations Special Rapporteur on Climate Change and Human Rights will deliver this year’s lecture at a moment when State obligations on climate change and human rights have become clearer in their nature and content, due to the complementary advisory opinions of three diverse international tribunals.
Professor Elisa Morgera’s lecture will reflect on States’ customary and treaty-based obligations to protect the climate system as part of inter-connected life-supporting systems of the planet, beyond any artificial distinction based on siloed understandings of the environment and planetary health. The lecture will then explore the role of customary law and the international law principles of sustainable development, common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, equity, intergenerational equity, and precaution, in complying with the stringent due diligence obligations to prevent significant harm to the climate system and to human rights.
On that basis, the talk will clarify when “fossil fuel production, fossil fuel consumption, the granting of fossil fuel exploration licences or the provision of fossil fuel subsidies” would indeed “constitute an internationally wrongful act which is attributable to that State,” and outline the implications for the duty of international cooperation. The lecture will be chaired by Professor Margaret Young, ARC Future Fellow and Director of Melbourne Law School’s Institute for International Law and the Humanities (IILAH).
The lecture will start at 6:00 pm.
About the Speaker
Professor Elisa Morgera holds the mandate of UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change, which was established in 2021. She is also Professor of International Law and Sustainability at Durham University (UK) and Professor in International and European Union Environmental Law at the University of Eastern Finland. Previously, she worked with the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization in Italy and the United Nations Development Programme in Barbados; and continued to collaborate with the United Nations and other international organisations as consultant and independent expert. She advised governments and civil society in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the South Pacific.
Ms. Morgera has published extensively on human rights and the environment, the human right to science, as well as the human rights of small-scale fishers, Indigenous Peoples, and children, at the climate-biodiversity and climate-ocean nexus. She has also published on business responsibility to respect human rights, as well as on the international principle and standards of equity among and within States, based on international environmental and human rights law. From 2019 to 2024, Ms Morgera directed the One Ocean Hub, a Global North/South research collaboration on human rights and the ocean, which connected natural and social scientists, legal experts, artists, human rights holders and defenders, to support fair, inclusive and transformative decision-making. Ms. Morgera holds a Law degree from the University of Trieste, Italy; a Master of Laws in Environmental Law from University College London; a Master of Research and a PhD in International Law from the European University Institute, Italy. She speaks English, French and Spanish, and some Portuguese.
About the lecture series
This lecture was inaugurated in 1999, at the Commemoration of the Centenary of the 1899 Hague Peace Conference. The lecture, focusing on Australia in the international legal order, honours the Fourth Dean of the Melbourne Law School, Kenneth Hamilton Bailey, who played a significant part in Australia’s contribution to the formation of the United Nations. The Melbourne Journal of International Law has co-hosted the lecture with the Melbourne Law School since 2016.
Event Venue & Nearby Stays
Theatre G08, Melbourne Law School (Building 106), 185 Pelham Street, Carlton, Australia
AUD 0.00
