Realizing the Right to Be Cold? Framing Processes and Outcomes Associated with the Inuit Petition on Human Rights and Global Warming

Sébastien Jodoin, along with two former research associates, Shannon Snow and Arielle Corobow, has co-authored a new article in the latest issue of the Law & Society Review:

Our article provides an in‐depth analysis of the framing processes and outcomes associated with a petition submitted by Inuit communities in the arctic on the human rights violations caused by climate change before the Inter‐American Commission of Human Rights in 2005. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews conducted in two different Inuit communities in Canada that have ties to the petition and with lawyers and activists in the transnational climate justice movement, we process‐trace the role that the petition has played in promoting discursive and collective action frames related to the recognition of the “right to be cold.” We argue that the Inuit petition articulated a novel “climate rights” frame through an innovative combination of legal argumentation, scientific research, and the oral testimony of Inuit communities concerning the ways in which climate impacts were affecting their human rights and traditional practices. Our findings reveal that the resonance of this frame has varied significantly among different actors, influencing the ideas and strategies of climate activists and lawyers around the world, but having limited resonance among policymakers in the United States or Canada or among Inuit communities themselves. Our research thus speaks to the complex challenges and ethical responsibilities that must be addressed in initiatives that seek to draw on international human rights law to influence policy decisions and empower Indigenous communities in the context of climate change.

The Rights of Persons with Disabilities in the Context of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change

At an official side-event held during the climate negotiations in Madrid, Prof. Sébastien Jodoin launched a new report on The Rights of Persons with Disabilities in the Context of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change developed in partnership with the Centre for International Environmental Law, Inclusiva, and the Council of Canadians with Disabilities. The report is available in pdf format and in word format.

IMG_2672.jpeg

Transnational Legal Process and Discourse in Environmental Governance: The Case of REDD+ in Tanzania

Sébastien Jodoin has just authored a new article entitled “Transnational Legal Process and Discourse in Environmental Governance: The Case of REDD+ in Tanzania” in (2019) 44(4) Law & Social Inquiry 1019-1050. The article can be accessed here.

Governments in developing countries have adopted policies, laws, and programs to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+), with the funding and rules provided by global institutions and transnational actors. The transnational legal process for REDD+, entailing the construction and diffusion of legal norms that govern the pursuit of REDD+, has been driven by discursive struggles over the purposes and requirements of REDD+. At the global level, the development of legal norms for REDD+ has been primarily influenced by coalitions committed to the discourses of ecological modernization, civic environmentalism, and to a lesser extent, climate justice. Through discourse analysis of the transnational legal process for REDD+ in Tanzania, I show how domestic efforts to operationalize REDD+ have been dominated by a government coalition that has emphasized green governmentality, made few concessions to the discourse of civic environmentalism, and completely neglected the climate justice claims of Indigenous Peoples. This case study reveals how discourse analysis may enhance the study of transnational legal phenomena by drawing attention to the complex interplay of global and domestic discourses and its role in shaping legal norms and reinforcing or challenging structures of power and knowledge within and across legal systems.

Children’s Rights and Trade Liberalization: Legal, Economic, and Policy Perspectives

Sébastien Jodoin and Candace Parker have co-authored a book chapter that appears in a new volume edited by Claire Fenton-Glynn entitled Children’s Rights in International Sustainable Development Law.

This chapter examines the opportunities and challenges for protecting and promoting the rights of children within the field of international trade law and the globalized economy to which it has given rise. In section 2, the authors review the effects of trade liberalization and economic globalization on the rights of children around the world. They outline the benefits and disadvantages of the economic growth emanating from the expansion of international trade, with emphasis on its implications for state and corporate obligations to protect, respect, and fulfill the rights of children under the UNCRC. In section 3, they discuss the relationship between legal obligations relating to the protection of the rights of children and those relating to the liberalization of trade under international law. They begin by outlining a children’s rights approach to international trade based on the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Child and then discuss whether and how the promotion of the rights of children could be accommodated within the rules and principles of the WTO. In section 4, they consider two potential instruments for advancing the rights of children at the intersections of these two regimes, namely children’s rights impact assessments and non-state market-driven certification programmes. In section 5, we conclude with a broader discussion of the prospects for protecting children’s rights in a globalizing world.

S’adapter aux changements climatiques : ce que la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés implique

J’ai signé un texte avec Géraud de Lassus qui s’intitutle “S’adapter aux changements climatiques : ce que la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés implique” dans un Dossier spécial sur La Constitution face aux changements climatiques de la revue Énergie – Environnement – Infrastructures.

L’adaptation au changement climatique a beau être une nécessité, les fondements d’un véritable droit de l’adaptation peinent encore à émerger tant à l’interne qu’à l’international. Mais pour autant, les autorités publiques disposent-elles en la matière d’une totale discrétion ? En s’intéessant à l’exemple du Canada, cette contribution s’interroge ainsi sur les balises que les droits fondamentaux à valeur constitutionnelle peuvent offrir en ce domaine pour mieux encadrer l’action (ou l’inaction) des autorités publiques. Elle cherche notamment à déterminer le sens et la portée que pourraient avoir, dans le contexte de l’adaptation, certains droits garantis par la Charte canadienne des droits et libertés.

Displacement due to responses to climate change: the role of a rights-based approach

Along with Kathryn Hansen and Caylee Hong, I've just co-authored a chapter in the Research Handbook on Climate Change, Migration and the Law entitled "Displacement due to responses to climate change: the role of a rights-based approach":

This chapter analyses responses to climate change and their impacts on the human rights of displaced populations. As such, this chapter will chiefly examine issues of internal displacement and forced evictions, to be distinguished from the larger concern of climate-induced migration and debates about a possible concept of climate ‘refugees’. Section 2 reviews the risks of displacement associated with three diverse types of responses to climate change: first, displacement due to the Site C Clean Energy Project, a dam and hydroelectric generating station in northern British Columbia (BC), Canada; second, forced evictions in the Cherangani Hills, Kenya resulting from the implementation of REDD+ initiatives; and third, planned relocation programmes in the Republic of Maldives (Maldives) developed to adapt to extreme weather events like tsunamis. Section 3 discusses the legal parameters of forced evictions in international human rights law. Section 4 concludes by setting out how a rights-based approach may assist in creating responses to climate change that are rooted in international human rights norms.

 

Routledge Handbook of Human Rights & Climate Governance

9781138232457.jpg

I am very pleased to announce the publication of the Routledge Handbook of Human Rights & Climate Governance that I have co-edited with Sébastien Duyck and Alyssa Johl.

This book brings together leading scholars and practitioners to offer a timely and comprehensive analysis of the opportunities and challenges for integrating human rights in diverse areas and forms of global climate governance. The first half of the book explores how human rights principles and obligations can be used to reconceive climate governance and shape responses to particular aspects of climate change. The second half of the book identifies lessons in the integration of human rights in climate advocacy and governance and sets out future directions in this burgeoning domain.

Featuring a diverse range of contributors and case studies from all over the world, this Handbook will be an essential resource for students, scholars, practitioners and policy makers with an interest in climate law and governance, human rights and international environmental law.

Forest Preservation in a Changing Climate: REDD+ and Indigenous and Community Rights in Indonesia and Tanzania

I am very pleased to announce the publication of my new book Forest Preservation in a Changing Climate: REDD+ and Indigenous and Community Rights in Indonesia and Tanzania (Cambridge University Press).

This book provides a comprehensive socio-legal examination of how global efforts to fight climate change by reducing carbon emissions in the forestry sector (known as REDD+) have affected the rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities in developing countries. Grounded in extensive qualitative empirical research conducted globally, the book shows that the transnational legal process for REDD+ has created both serious challenges and unexpected opportunities for the recognition and protection of indigenous and community rights. It reveals that the pursuit of REDD+ has resulted in important variations in how human rights standards are understood and applied across multiple sites of law in the field of REDD+, with mixed results for Indigenous Peoples and local communities in Indonesia and Tanzania. With its original findings, rigourous research design, and interdisciplinary analytical framework, this book will make a valuable contribution to the study of transnational legal processes in a globalizing world.

An open-access electronic version of the book can be downloaded here. A printed version can also be purchased here from Cambridge University Press.

*I want to thank Carbon Tanzania for giving me permission to use the photograph taken from its Yaeda Valley Project that appears on the cover reproduced here. Carbon Tanzania is a social enterprise that works with Indigenous communities in Tanzania …

*I want to thank Carbon Tanzania for giving me permission to use the photograph taken from its Yaeda Valley Project that appears on the cover reproduced here. Carbon Tanzania is a social enterprise that works with Indigenous communities in Tanzania to support the protection of their forests through engagement with the voluntary carbon market. Given the high level of social and environmental performance that it has achieved in its project and its community-based approach, I have committed to purchasing carbon credits from Carbon Tanzania to off-set the carbon emissions resulting from any travel that I may undertake to promote this book.

Call for Papers: Winter 2018 McGill Law & Society Workshop Series

The McGill Law & Society Workshop Series invites scholars and graduate students in law, the social sciences, and the humanities to present works-in-progress broadly falling within the field of law and society. We are seeking papers that use qualitative, quantitative, or interpretivist methods to explore the complex relationship between legal phenomena and social, political, and economic interactions, institutions, and processes. Our interest in socio-legal research extends to state, non-state, formal, and informal norms, institutions, and processes.

 

Workshop Format

The workshop will be held on Mondays from 12:00 to 13:30 once or twice a month during the winter 2018 semester.

Each workshop will begin with a brief 5-minute introduction by the author(s) of a work-in-progress that will be circulated in advance to the participants. This will be followed by a 10-minute discussion of the work-in-progress by a discussant specifically selected for this purpose. Finally, the workshop will then proceed to a general exchange involving the author and the participants.

Lunch will be provided by the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy.

 

Application Instructions & Deadlines

Authors interested in presenting a work-in-progress at the workshop should send a 500-word abstract or a draft paper to Prof. Sébastien Jodoin (sebastien.jodoin-pilon[a]mcgill.ca)  and Prof. Ronald Niezen (ronald.niezen[a]mcgill.ca) by November 3rd, 2017. The workshop organizers will contact applicants regarding their submissions by early December 2017.

McGill Law & Society Workshop Series (Winter 2017 Line-up)

“Informing on Oneself and Others: New Uses of Confession and Denunciation in Security”

Prof. Anthony Amicelle & Prof. Karine Côté-Boucher, Université de Montréal, École de criminologie

Discussant: Prof. Jason Carmichael, McGill University, Department of Sociology

Monday, March 20th, 12:00 to 1:30, Peterson Hall, 3460 McTavish Street, Room 116

This paper stems an ongoing conversation the two authors have had for the past two years as they discuss their respective research findings in two distinct areas of security governance, and what these findings tell us about the role of denunciation and confession in promoting such governance. Informed by field research undertaken with bank compliance officers and financial intelligence units officials in United Kingdom, Canada and Switzerland, Amicelle’s work concerns policing practices deployed at the interface of finance and security against money laundering and terrorist financing. Informed by field research undertaken with frontline border officials and with the Canada-US cross-border trucking industry, Côté-Boucher’s work examines how the practice of border security in North America transforms social relations in a variety of settings, from workplaces to ports of entry. Interestingly, both our works are interested in regimes of security that involve a multiplicity of private and public actors. Their interactions are predicated upon significant investments in infrastructures (either physical or technological) by these private for-profit actors for training personnel and securing of their facilities as well as, more importantly for the purpose of this paper, to facilitate the transmission of important amounts of data to state authorities. This paper fulfills an exploratory purpose: to start shedding light on how current security arrangements compel revelation, or rather, how they depend on a myriad of decisions taken when actors are required (or invited) to either inform on their clients or reveal details about their activities. We thus ask a simple question: what does informing on oneself and others tell us about contemporary security arrangements and the social relations they foster? In order to begin tacking this question, the paper begins with a short review of the existing literature on the topic, ranging from history and political sciences to criminology, sociology and law. We then propose preliminary thoughts on the uses of these veridiction techniques in the contemporary making of security, interested in what they make visible and what social relations they produce.

“Socio-Legal Aspects of Housing, Land and Property (HLP) Restitution in ISIL Liberated Areas of Northern Iraq”

Prof. Jon Unruh, McGill University, Department of Geography

Discussant: Prof. René Provost, McGill University, Faculty of Law

Monday, April 10th, 12:00 to 1:30, Peterson Hall, 3460 McTavish Street, Room 116

As Iraqi and supporting forces seek to retake areas controlled by ISIL in northern Iraq, the return of approximately three million internally dislocated persons (IDPs) to their lands and properties will constitute a significant socio-legal recovery problem. ISIL transacted properties that were confiscated or abandoned in order to fund its civilian and military engagements. As a result, returning IDPs will find a great deal of HLP to be occupied by others, which together with widespread damage and destruction will necessitate returnees seeking permanent or temporary residence elsewhere, usually on someone else’s property, thereby compounding the difficulty of overall return. Effective return and restitution will be further complicated by a high degree of informal property rights prior to dislocation, the presence of land mines, destruction of property records, continued sales of abandoned and confiscated HLP, the creation of a new land and property rights system under ISIL, and a lack of institutions able to support return. With the default reaction of returnees to finding others in their HLP being to rely on armed kin, the Iraqi government and the UN-International Organization for Migration are working to put together a state sponsored HLP restitution programme tailored to the specific problems of ISIL liberated areas. This presentation reports on the author’s experience assisting this effort, focusing in particular the process of restitution programming, and options for remedies.

“You Can’t Take my Children in the Name of Religion: Sunni and Shi‘i Attempts to Reform Women Custody Right in Lebanon”

Dr. Jean-Michel Landry, Banting Post-Doctoral Fellow, McGill University, Department of Anthropology

Discussant: Prof. Katherine Lemons, McGill University, Department of Anthropology

Monday, April 24th, 12:00 to 1:30, Peterson Hall, 3460 McTavish Street, Room 116

In November 2016, the Lebanese media reported the story of a Shi‘i woman sent to jail for refusing to give up custody of her three-year-old child. The prison sentence was based on a judgment issued by a Shi‘i family court stating that the women’s youngest child shall live under the custody of his father until puberty. The news provoked a tide of moral outrage across the country; protests and sits in were organized. Such waves of protest are hardly new in Lebanon: three years before (in October 2013) Lebanese citizens hit the street demanding that Shi‘i divorced mothers be allowed to keep custody of their children for a longer period. “You can’t take my children in the name of religion,” read the placard of a female protestor. This legal campaign was directly inspired by the success of Sunni Lebanese activists in reforming the custody laws of their co-religionists. In 2012, indeed, the legal period during which divorced women retain custody of their children was extended from five to twelve years. To this day, however, Shi‘i Lebanese have been unable to implement such reform; as a result, women therefore regularly lose the custody of their children after two years. Recent events show that Shi‘i mothers face prison sentences if they refuse to obey these rules. Based on multi-year ethnographic and documentary research, this paper compares the recent campaigns undertaken by Sunnis and Shi‘i Lebanese to extend the duration of maternal custody. The inquiry is based on fieldwork observations (court audiences, NGO debates), interviews (with activists, litigants, shari‘a judges and lawyers) and a study of selected legal cases. Why, I ask, can two parallel campaigns around the same issue, launched in the same years and in the same country produce such contrasting results? But instead of approaching this question through a study of Shi‘i and Sunni legal traditions, I turn my glaze toward the political and legal system in which these traditions are currently embedded: the Lebanese consociational constitution. Investigating the contemporary mechanics of Islamic law, I argue, requires paying attention to a larger set of institutions, offices, and networks, such as ministers, MPs, secular activists, NGOs, civil judges, and members of other religious communities. Only by being attentive to a broader range of legal rules and norms, I suggest, can we come to an understanding of what Islamic law has become in our contemporary societies.

RSVP

To confirm your participation in one or more of these workshops, please click here. This will ensure that you receive the paper one week before the workshop and will help us in ordering lunch.

About the McGill Law & Society Workshop Series

The McGill Law & Society Workshop Series features scholars and graduate students in law, the social sciences, and the humanities presenting works-in-progress that use qualitative, quantitative, or interpretivist methods to explore the complex relationship between legal phenomena and social, political, and economic interactions, institutions, and processes. Each workshop begins with a brief 5-minute introduction by the author(s) of a work-in-progress that is circulated in advance. This is followed by a 10-minute discussion of the work-in-progress by a discussant. Finally, the workshop then proceeds to a general exchange involving the author and the participants.

With gratitude for the support provided by the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy.

Call for Papers - Law & Society Workshop Series (Winter 2017)

My colleague Ron Niezen and I are organizing a new workshop series on law and society at McGill. The call for papers can be found below.

Call for Papers
Law & Society Workshop Series
McGill University, Winter 2017
 
The Law & Society Workshop Series invites scholars and graduate students in law, the social sciences, and the humanities to present works-in-progress broadly falling within the field of law and society. We are particularly interested in papers that use qualitative, quantitative, or interpretivist methods to explore the complex relationship between legal phenomena and social, political, and economic interactions, institutions, and processes. Our interest in research that addresses the social antecedents and consequences of law extends to state, non-state, formal, and informal norms, institutions, and processes.
 
Workshop Format
The workshop will be held on Mondays from 12:00 to 13:30 once a month during the winter 2017 semester.
 
Each workshop will begin with a brief 5-minute introduction by the author(s) of a work-in-progress that will be circulated in advance to the participants. This will be followed by a 10-minute discussion of the work-in-progress by a discussant specifically selected for this purpose. Finally, the workshop will then proceed to a general exchange involving the author and the participants.
 
Lunch will be provided by the Katharine A. Pearson Chair in Civil Society and Public Policy.
 
Application Instructions & Deadlines
Authors interested in presenting a work-in-progress at the workshop should send a 500-word abstract or a draft paper to Prof. Ronald Niezen (ronald.niezen@mcgill.ca) and Prof. Sébastien Jodoin (sebastien.jodoin-pilon@mcgill.ca) by December 20th, 2016. In early January, the workshop organizers will contact the authors to schedule their participation in the workshop.

What Difference Does CBDR Make? A Socio-Legal Analysis of the Role of Differentiation in the Transnational Legal Process for REDD+

An article that I have co-authored with Sarah Mason-Case has won a competition held as part of the fifth anniversary of Transnational Environmental Law. It is currently available as an open-access publication here. The abstract can be found below:

This article offers a socio-legal analysis of the role played by the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities (CBDR) in the development, diffusion, and implementation of jurisdictional REDD+ activities throughout the developing world. It employs a qualitative research method known as process tracing to uncover whether and, if so, to what extent and how actors have used CBDR to support the emergence and effectiveness of the transnational legal process for REDD+. The article argues that the transnational legal process for REDD+ reflects a conception of CBDR in which developing country governments may take on voluntary commitments to reduce their carbon emissions, with the multilateral, bilateral, and private sources of financial support and technical assistance provided by developed countries, international organizations, non-governmental organizations, and corporations. This creative conception and application of CBDR has fostered the construction and diffusion of legal norms for REDD+ because it has influenced the interests, ideas, and identities of public and private actors in the North and South. However, the early challenges associated with the implementation of REDD+ reveal a worrying gap between the financial pledges made by developed countries and the costs associated with the full implementation of REDD+, as well as contradictions in the very way in which the responsibilities of various countries have been defined in the context of REDD+. The analysis has important implications for the transnational governance of REDD+, as well as for scholarship on the role of differentiation in the pursuit of effective and equitable climate change solutions.