Climate Breakfast Seminar with Dr. Claire Methven O’Brien
Human rights, climate and environment in the new paradigm of holistic sustainable business regulation: New best friends or frenemies?
The Centre for International Law and Governance (CILG), the Copenhagen Center for Disaster Research (COPE) of the Faculty of Law, University of Copenhagen, and the student organisations Casus Clima and International Law Student Association (ILSA) – Copenhagen are happy to announce the IV Climate Breakfast Seminar with Dr Claire Methven O’Brien, University of Dundee and Danish Institute for Human Rights.
New sustainable business regulations increasingly combine human rights, environment and climate change in their objectives and scope. The EU’s draft corporate due diligence Directive, new public as well as private frameworks on ‘Environmental, Social and Governance’ or ‘sustainable’ investment, and the United Nations draft treaty and business and human rights, for instance, address all three in parallel. Human rights laws are increasingly mobilised in the context of climate litigation, and the recent declaration of a right to a clean and healthy environment appears to complete the circle. But if their necessity seems self-evident, in some ways the adoption of approaches that process human rights, climate and environmental goals as normatively equivalent and operationally reconcilable still represent an under-remarked on departure in legal and policy terms. What are its implications? Do the three objectives always pull in the same direction? What can the cases of the EU draft due diligence directive and sustainable investment taxonomy tell us about the potential challenges and contradictions of ‘holistic’ sustainability approaches?
Claire Methven O’Brien is a Baxter Fellow and Lecturer at University of Dundee. She is also a Senior Researcher at the Danish Institute for Human Rights and a Global Practitioner at the University of Strathclyde Business School. Claire’s research concerns business and human rights, where she also has extensive practitioner and advisory experience. Claire’s publications include the Council of Europe’s Business and human rights. A Handbook for Legal Practitioners (2019), Public procurement and human rights: Opportunities, Risks and Dilemmas for the State as Buyer (Edward Elgar, 2019) and Research Methods in Human Rights (forthcoming). She has recently authored two expert reports for the European Parliament on the EU’s anticipated corporate human rights and environmental due diligence Directive, as well as various publications concerning ongoing UN negotiations towards a business and human rights treaty.
The Climate Breakfast Seminar Series was launched in June 2019 as a platform to provide expert insights on crucial contemporary climate change issues.
Time: 3 October 2022 from 09:00 to 10:00
Venue: Room 7A.0.16 (Pejsestuen) and online via zoom (link will be provided upon registration)
For registration, please click here.
For further information, please contact Beatriz Martinez Romera: beatriz.martinez.romera@jur.ku.dk