Climate Justice, Racial Justice, & Regional Human Rights Systems

The global ecological crisis is a racial justice crisis, and a crisis of historic colonial injustice. Our work on Climate Justice, Racial Justice & Regional Human Rights Systems brings anti-colonial and racial justice to the center of legal, policy, and academic work to combat environmental degradation, climate change, and related displacement. We are striving to disrupt the silos that prevent meaningful trans-national collaboration across movements for racial, climate, and migrant justice. This initiative is directed by S. Priya Morley, who has been based at the Bernstein Institute for Human Rights at NYU Law since 2024.

Our work aims to support and collaborate with impacted communities and movement leaders to producing knowledge that brings attention to the global ecological crisis as a site of historic and ongoing injustice, and who have an interest in challenging this injustice through international legal frameworks. To further this work, we have engaged with the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) and Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), and UN Special Procedures and anti-racism mechanisms.

Following the recent climate advisory opinions of the IACtHR and the International Court of Justice (ICJ), our current focus is developments in the African human rights system, as where the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights (AfCHPR) is seized with a climate advisory opinion.