🍻 Selber Bier Brauen

International law is an ordering language. It is predicated upon an imperial, western-centric, and hierarchical structure. It is a language of domination, of exclusion, of differentiated inclusion, but also of promise. The universal aspiration of international law is by necessity a project of inclusion via subordination. When in the 16^th century Francisco de Vitoria recognised the natives as rational beings and thus members of the human community, he also meant that they were bound by the law of nations. As such, Vitoria was not merely extending international law outwardly to the Americas but rather legislating the very institutions of subordination that would bind the natives and subject them to legal and colonial domination.

Language holds the medium by which community belonging is exercised. One cannot therefore reject language per se. That is also true for the language that is international law. As such, the Third World did rather seek to contest and renegotiate the terms on which international law was established and continued to operate. As Anthony Anghie has demonstrated, over five centuries, the language of international law perpetuated the “dynamic of difference” that it was also supposed to bridge. The oscillation between “the logic of biology” and “the logic of improvement” is an endemic feature of the international legal order. In that sense, the language of international law, which the Global South uses and appeals to, does not simply hold the promise of rectification; it also reproduces the problems it is supposed to help solve. This short reflection addresses such contradictions and how reflexivity in international law could help mitigate them. It warns, however, that reflexivity must not be self-congratulatory in its celebration of progress at the expense of the wilful forgetting of the constitutive thread of colonialism, racism, and imperialism at the core of international law.

Sites of international law and colonial peripheries

The sites of international law (The Hague, Geneva, New York, Strasbourg, etc.) are hyper visible centres of diffusion and exercise of the international legal order. Such ordering, however, reposes on the invisibilisation of the peripheries, being the colonial periphery. The geography and epistemic constitution of international lawmaking and practice continue to restrain the possibility with which the global majority can speak, act, shape, and contest international law. For the colonial periphery, justice remains as distant as ever. Sovereignty demands a non-sovereign upon which the doctrine is held. The seeds of the negation of sovereignty are contained in the legal doctrine itself. Colonialism and colonial domination are built upon the constitutive definition and powers of self-determination.

Yet, as Karin Mickelson explains, for Third World scholars, the “tremendous faith” in the emancipatory potential of international law cohabits with an acute awareness of “the ways in which law has been made to serve the interests of the powerful”. The double bind in which Third World diplomats and scholars found themselves throughout the second half of the 20^th century was thus rejecting the colonial origins and legacies of international law and its Eurocentricity while at the same time harnessing the emancipatory potential of international law to materialise alternative visions of global order. In fact, Third World states have had no outside option from which to operate and contest the existing strictures of international law. And resistance must operate within the constraints of an option that is, in effect, impossible to reject. There is no exit button to international law.

The promise of reflexivity

Reflexivity calls for analyses of globalisation and the international legal order that are attuned to history, historical genealogies, and the epistemic geographies of international law. It may be tempting to celebrate the idea that progress has been made.  Yet it is also important to remember that international law progresses through a renewal by forgetting itself. Writing on a different discipline, International Relations scholar Sankaran Krishna called this “willful amnesia”. E. Tendayi Achiume and Debra Thompson referred to this process as “aphasia”, which is “a calculated forgetting and unwillingness to confront the persisting and imperial operation” of a discipline. International law is the epitome of such processes.

From natural law in the 16^th century to positivism in 19^th century’s international law, to the League of Nations’ mandate system to the postwar UN global governance, to the language of international development, good governance, human rights, and (inter)national security, international law morphs itself through the recycling of its narratives of exclusion and domination, its grammars and vocabulary of oppression, and its hierarchies of belonging. Each iteration of these developments of international law is couched in a mantra of progress while reproducing those colonial hierarchies.

Diplomats and scholars from the Third World have, for decades, emphasised the constitutive thread of colonialism, racism, and imperialism that sustains these continuities. When Judge Radhabinod Pal demonstrated in his monumental dissent at the Tokyo Tribunal how imperial power still governed the postwar order, when Judge Mohammed Bedjaoui linked the unjust international economic system to colonial plunder, when Judge Keba Mbaye argued that the right to development is a human right, when Third World states appealed to the concept of “the common heritage of mankind” as a principle for the governance of the seas, when the G77 pushed for an ICJ opinion on the unfinished decolonisation of the Chagos Islands, we are seeing international law as a continued site of struggle to infuse new meanings to old imperial structures, to displace the seats of imperial power for sites of more equitable predicates of global existence.  In that sense then, now more than ever, it urges to continue the questioning of the self-congratulatory premise of international law of a post-colonial world. That world – our world – is indeed still steeped in colonial conditions.

But it is not just a matter of procedural reforms and a better representation of the global majority in decision-making institutions. It is not just a matter of wrestling the power off the tentacles of global corporations and institutions that epitomised colonial domination. The question is not simply one of determining the optimal and equitable systems of rule-making in international law. It is not simply a matter of deciding whether majority voting or consensus building should govern deliberations and international lawmaking in international fora. Because in the end, sovereign equality of states is an illusion insofar as other pressure points are embedded in the international system. In a world of veto powers, weighted voting, unilateral sanctions, exterritoriality, and conditionalities, sovereign equality is basically what (powerful) states make of it.

Hoping against hope and working towards the promise

There is certainly a potential problem in looking too much into the history of international law to the point of curtailing its possible horizons. There is a range of possible futures. Indeed, international law still holds a promise. What is also clear is that the Global South has never resigned to leaving the future of international law in the hands of its western centres of power. But here also lies a tension. Between rejection and reform, the Global South continues to engage with international law. But it is not yet settled whether international law as an oppressive structure also holds available tools for genuine reform and evolution from its colonial legacy and imperial present. Does an emancipatory potential of international law indeed co-exist with its oppressive past and present? In the history and evolution of international law, as Anthony Anghie reminds us, “imperialism is a constant” (emphasis in original). While “the tremendous faith” in the emancipatory potential of international law is a required element for a continued engagement toward reform and repair, rejection of this legal order is also within the range of possible strategies.

In any case, assuming that the light at the end of the tunnel is not an incoming train, there must be an avenue between reform and rejection. But then it remains to address the question of whose task that is to pick up that struggle. What sorts of coalition building might be necessary to confront the colonial legacies of international law? What type of reflexivity might be required from those in the Global North and at the centre, from those who enjoy the privileges of being fully human? In the words of Frantz Fanon, “the huge task… of reintroducing… the whole of humankind” into the world would necessitate “the indispensable help… of the European peoples”, not because they are uniquely qualified, but because they “must realize that in the past they have often joined the ranks of our common masters where colonial questions were concerned”. As such, they “must first decide to wake up and shake themselves”. The Centre for Advanced Studies RefLex is an important and welcome step in that direction. This responsibility also falls unto a wider set of actors and institutions with shared and overlapping ethical and political agendas orientated towards justice, broadly defined.

In the work ahead, the main challenge is therefore to break from continued reification of the standard of civilisation and burdened membership in the international community. Better yet, to build that (yet to be) international community whose foundation must be the shared norm that imperialism is a crime. An initial step would be to realise that the promise of justice must not be the very device of its (perpetual) deferral.

The post International Law and the Imperial Ordering of the International appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

The Amazon rainforest and the surrounding biomes are vital for the ecology and agriculture of the South American continent as well as for the world’s climate. The biodiversity of this region is not even close to being fully discovered, nor can its importance for life on this planet be fully grasped. At the same time, deforestation in the Amazon is so severe that some scientists see the world’s largest rainforest as close to irreversible “tipping points” where vast areas could dry out, unleashing ecological and economic havoc in Brazil but also releasing massive amounts of carbon into the atmosphere, with potentially catastrophic consequences for our global climate.

This article will look at cattle supply chains from the Amazon to global markets and will show how law plays an ambiguous role with respect to the Amazon. On the one hand, it enables neo-colonial exploitation of natural resources in the Amazon and secures the extraction of profits by legalising illegal deforestation. In this regard the criticism that law supports (neo-)colonial interests of economic and financial elites and creates even more wealth and power is proven right. On the other hand, global commodity chains touch upon various jurisdictions which offer legal pressure points to use law against capitalist interests for the protection of land and livelihoods of Indigenous and rural groups. Innovative transnational approaches to anti-money laundering laws and a growing body of the so-called corporate due diligence legislation in Europe and some countries in the Global South offer legal opportunities to challenge the current hegemonic economic practices. Drawing from my experience in holding multinational companies to account for their involvement in human rights abuses along global value chains and from building the Transnational Litigation Coalition (TLC), I want to explore how the legal regimes of a globalised economy can be confronted with potential counter-legal regimes. The concept of reflexivity as developed by scholars in the Centre for Advanced Studies “Reflexive Globalisation and the Law: Colonial Legacies and their Implications in the 21st Century” is helpful in describing the approach of Indigenous and rural communities as well as civil society organisations in partly using laws against their original intention. I will also briefly sketch out the necessity of new approaches to strategic litigation that are more collaborative and responsive to challenges of transnational cooperation.

Deforestation, cattle ranching, and the transnational process of legalising illegality

The economic exploitation of the Amazonian rainforest was systematically supported by the Brazilian military dictatorship in the 1960s. Today, more than 90 per cent of deforestation in the Amazonian rainforest is illegal under Brazilian law. Cattle ranching is the primary force in converting deforested land into pasture for cattle grazing and later into soy plantations. Next to soy and cattle, other important drivers of environmental destruction in the Amazon region are also gold and bauxite mining as well as timber harvesting. The Brazilian legal framework codifies processes to survey, demarcate, and title territories in the Amazon region and recognises in particular Indigenous peoples’ customary rights over their lands and resources. Through its agrarian reform agency, the Brazilian government also establishes settlements for landless peasants. Additionally, the government has established “extractive reserves” to protect the rainforest while enabling local communities to gather non-timber forest products such as nuts, fruits, and the sap of rubber trees. Despite the protected status, as of 2020, invading cattle ranchers laid claim to more than 120,000 square kilometres of Indigenous lands across Brazil – an area nearly three times the size of Switzerland. These ranchers understand themselves as bringing prosperity and development to the wilderness and, since the military dictatorship in the 1970s, have used various legal instruments to legalise their land grabbing retrospectively. Nevertheless, a lot of the current deforestation is happening illegally.

Such invasion leads to deforestation that not only destroys ecosystems but also results in human rights violations in different ways: Indigenous communities’ autonomy is undermined, exposing them to violence, threats, and the loss of their traditional livelihoods – experiences that can all be qualified as human rights violations under the UN treaties and, in many cases, as criminal offences under Brazilian law. Ranchers frequently subject their employees to forced labour and other forms of severe labour exploitation – referred to in Brazilian law as “conditions analogous to slavery”. Since 1995, federal labour inspectors have rescued more than 17,000 people from forced labour or other conditions analogous to slavery on cattle ranches – predominantly in parts of the Amazon rainforest where deforestation is most intense and persistent.

Thus, despite reasonably good legal protection, poor law enforcement and the significant economic interests of powerful corporations allow much of the meat and leather produced in the Amazon to stem from, or facilitate, illegal activities. As these commodities are traded transnationally from cattle ranches to slaughterhouses and tanneries, global food producers, and leather manufacturers for fashion as well as the car industry – their illegal origin is incrementally legalised through the supply process. Law enables this process through international trade law, contract law, and company law.

The actors involved in this transnational process are multinational meat-producing companies like JBS (headquartered in Brazil), trading companies like Cargill, logistics companies, global supermarket chains like Casino, and automotive companies like VW/Audi. Banks and other financial institutions finance transactions and invest in this lucrative business of resource extraction. All these actors organise their interactions through legal means such as contracts and other regulatory tools. As the commodity passes through different steps along the supply chain, it becomes increasingly difficult to trace it, and the multinational companies can easily turn a blind eye to the illegal origin of the commodity. While these corporations promise their best efforts to ensure “traceability”, they in fact condone the practice of “cattle laundering” and help obscure the origin of meat and leather, which contributes to the destruction of ecosystems, livelihoods, and human rights violations. All this is facilitated by economic legal regimes that re-describe illegal resource extraction as lawful, therefore enabling these goods to enter national and global supply chains legally. In this way, the fragmented transnational legal order functions to obscure responsibility and diffuse accountability.

Legal pressure points and opportunities for a reflexive re-purposing of law

While global supply chains are regulated by international trade law, it is the law of contracts and corporate law that secure the extraction of resources from the Amazon and enable the trade along global supply chains, facilitating the flow of profits. This global flow of commodities touches upon various jurisdictions and is also confronted with different legal regimes that open up the possibility for challenging the original illegality of extraction. Each of the corporate or financial actors involved in the trade of Amazonian meat and leather is incorporated across several jurisdictions in addition to Brazil – in Europe and North America. This gives Indigenous groups, civil society organisations, and human rights lawyers an opportunity to coordinate their efforts transnationally in response to commodity chains and the economic actors that drive them.

Anti-money laundering

Anti-money laundering (AML) legislation in the European Union, for instance, offers underutilised opportunities to challenge the trade and money flows derived from meat and leather produced on illegally deforested land. These laws are not designed to protect ecosystems or Indigenous lands; rather, they aim to prevent organised crime from legalising their profits. While the aims of AML law are to protect neoliberal market economies, representatives of affected communities are redeploying these laws to challenge the legitimacy of the accumulation itself. The dogmatic hook is the so-called “all crimes” approach of these laws, meaning that any crime can serve as a predicate offence. This means that any financial gain derived from the processing or trading of a product originating from a criminal offence of any kind is tainted. As a result, anyone dealing in Amazonian products derived from illegally deforested land may face potential criminal liability for money laundering. These legal arguments have been successfully tested in British courts and are currently under investigation in France. Additionally, the EU Anti-Money Laundering Regulation was reformed in May 2024 to impose strict due diligence obligations on accountants, auditors, tax advisors, and other so-called “obliged entities”. As this regulation will be implemented by the EU member states by 2027, it will potentially heighten compliance responsibilities on corporations dealing with produce from illegally deforested land.

Human Rights Due Diligence

A parallel development evolves around the concept of Human Rights Due Diligence (HRDD). Since the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights were adopted by the UN Human Rights Council in 2011 and the revision of the OECD guidelines for multinational corporations in that same year, companies have had a responsibility to detect and mitigate environmental and human rights abuses in their supply chains. These international standards have led to several legislative efforts in countries like Germany and France, but also by the European Commission. France introduced the Loi de Vigilance in 2017 and Germany the Supply Chain Due Diligence Act in 2021. On the EU level the Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive was adopted in February 2023 along with other relevant regulations such as the European Deforestation Regulation. While the German law as well as the EU Directive have been just recently substantially watered down, an important essence of these laws remains: they establish a corporate due diligence duty. This duty obliges companies to identify, prevent, mitigate, and remediate negative human rights and environmental impacts in the company’s own operations, their subsidiaries, and their value chains. Rightsholders negatively affected by non-compliance with these due diligence obligations can either pursue civil litigation or use administrative enforcement routes to ensure that the rights violations they suffered end and harms are remediated. In practice this means that communities affected by deforestation can demand of that companies under the scope of these laws to stop using products from their territories and to help mitigate the harms. In France, a case against the French supermarket chain Casino has been filed. The plaintiffs request that the Court mandates Casino to develop, execute, and disclose a comprehensive vigilance plan that identifies and mitigates risks associated with the group’s operations. They also seek compensation for damage to their customary lands and the adverse effects on their livelihoods due to Casino’s failure to meet its duty of vigilance.

Reflexivity of the law to build counter-hegemony

Although legal regimes can initially enable neo-colonial exploitation, others can be used – such as the AML laws – against their original purpose to both protect rainforest ecosystems and give space for Indigenous and traditional peoples to claim their traditional rights to their territories. Protection, on the one hand, does exist on the national level in Brazil, but, while these laws are subverted due to powerful economic interests in exploitation, there are also legal routes that tackle the transnational actors who are incentivising these practices by maximising the profits and legalising illegality. Both these legal routes – AML and HRDD – are still in development and have not yet proven their effectiveness. Still, they hold the potential to not only substantially illegalise profits made currently through the exploitation and destruction of the Amazon rainforest; they offer an opportunity for counter-jurisdictional resistance, in the sense that Indigenous legal understandings of legitimate access and use of the Amazon’s resources are brought into legal disputes concerning globalised commodity flows and their (il)legality.

For this potential to be meaningfully used, transnational collaboration between Indigenous groups, civil society organisations, researchers, and legal experts is necessary and needs to further develop learning from past experiences of transnational strategic litigation. One example of such an initiative is the Transnational Legal Coalition. Groups involved are aiming to mirror and disrupt the legal infrastructure of globalised extraction. They work on connecting local Indigenous struggles with transnational legal routes to challenge the transnational actors involved in making rainforest destruction lucrative. The aim is to re-enforce local struggles of Indigenous and traditional communities in defence of their lands, traditions, and access to the forest by attacking the transnational economic actors, finance institutions, and economic service providers further down the supply chain.

The post (Il)legalising the Destruction of the Amazon appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

The energy transition has become a central normative axis of global climate action. International instruments, national regulatory frameworks, and public policies currently converge in the acceleration of renewable energy as a response to the climate crisis. However, this process, frequently presented as inherently positive, is not politically neutral. On the contrary, it unfolds asymmetrically across territories marked by deep historical power imbalances, particularly in the Global South.

Under the category of clean energy, extractive dynamics are reconfigured in ways that reproduce classic patterns of territorial dispossession of Indigenous peoples and rural communities, racial violence, and violence against women and girls. A weak implementation of the right to free, prior, and informed consultation, the erosion of environmental protection frameworks, and the limited enforceability of corporate human rights obligations reveal a structural gap between climate commitments and justice standards.

In this context, the energy transition directly challenges the law, not only as an instrument that enables investments and large-scale projects, but also as a field of dispute over responsibility, distribution of burdens, and reparation of harms. Can we speak of a just transition when social and territorial costs continue to be externalised onto the same groups historically subjected to vulnerability? This article puts forward the proposition that a truly reflexive energy transition necessarily requires not only recognising harms and measuring impacts but also dismantling entrenched forms of control, authority, and epistemic hierarchy within the governance of the transition itself.

Green colonialism

Many scholars have characterised this reconfiguration of current colonial relations, unfolding under the guise of energy transition or sustainability, as green colonialism. Far from representing a rupture with fossil fuel and extractivist models, the transition tends to inscribe itself, through new material forms and normative legitimacies, into a long-standing colonial regime of dispossession and inequality. As Hamouchene and Sandwell observe, transitions driven from the Global North are embedded in a logic of accumulation that reproduces “the parameters of dispossession and resource plunder that characterise the fossil fuel regime”, now under a paradigm of nature’s commodification presented as sustainable. In this sense, the energy transition is not primarily orientated toward guaranteeing access to new forms of energy that do not exacerbate the climate crisis but toward securing new cycles for wealth generation and ensuring the supply of industrial centres and elites.

Green colonialism thus constitutes a regime of structural externalisation of costs. The social, territorial, and cultural impacts of the transition are concentrated in territories that have been historically colonised, while financial and economic benefits are captured in the Global North. Other authors, such as Farhana Sultana, describe these dynamics as a web of material, epistemic, and political relations through which the climate crisis and its supposed solutions not only reproduce colonial, racial, and economic violence but also, in climate governance arenas such as the UN climate and biodiversity conferences, tend to obscure historical responsibilities, displace costs onto already marginalised populations, and produce new forms of control over territories, bodies, and futures in the Global South. The transition thus emerges not only as a technical process but also as a new field of geopolitical dispute over who decides, who pays, and who is sacrificed.

Law and the work of practitioners play a fundamental role in this new arena of contestation. Katharina Pistor explains this clearly when she notes that “capital is not a thing but a legal relation”, produced through the legal codification of assets to which law grants “priority, durability, universality, and convertibility”. From this perspective, the energy transition is not only a technological transformation but also a process of legal recodification of new objects that can once again be appropriated, protected, and made profitable in the name of sustainability.

In line with Pistor, law cannot be understood as a neutral instrument that merely regulates the transition. Categories such as property, investment, clean energy or due diligence are not only technical concepts but also legal and political constructions anchored in normative matrices of the Global North that are projected onto colonial and postcolonial territories, either to enable dispossession or, in their counter-hegemonic potential, to try to prevent it. The question is not only what the law regulates in the energy transition but also whom it protects, whom it exposes and under which rationalities of power such protection or exposure is structured.

Legal instruments and strategic litigation

Examples of global legal instruments that currently frame the energy transition include the Paris Agreement, the Escazú Agreement, and the Corporate Due Diligence laws. These instruments are often presented as normative proposals aimed at aligning business activity with climate action and the protection of human rights. However, both in their design and in their implementation, these frameworks have tended to reproduce structures of inequality by prioritising investment stability, corporate legal certainty, and global competitiveness over the effective guarantee of human rights, particularly the rights of Indigenous peoples and communities.

Nonetheless, these same legal frameworks have the potential to be reclaimed from below by communities defending their territories, who contest them through a counter-hegemonic reading. In this blog, and as a lawyer who has accompanied communities in the Global South for twenty years, I would like to share reflections from two experiences that illustrate these tensions with particular clarity: the litigation pursued by the Zapotec community of Unión Hidalgo against Électricité de France in Mexico and the defence of the Pilmaiquén River by the Mapuche Williche people against the Norwegian state-owned company Statkraft in Chile.

In the Unión Hidalgo case, the Gunaa Sicarú wind farm promoted by Électricité de France was developed through irregular individual contracts over Indigenous communal lands, without guaranteeing an adequate consultation process. The community documented practices of social fragmentation, criminalisation, and violence against human rights defenders. The community, in alliance with the Project on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ProDESC) and the European Centre for Constitutional and Human Rights, decided in 2021 to file legal action under the French Duty of Vigilance Law, the first case in which an Indigenous community in Latin America used this law to defend its territory.

Although this law represented a historic breakthrough by turning due diligence into a legally binding obligation, its practical application has revealed structural gaps and procedural barriers that severely limit its transformative potential.

Four years after the beginning of the litigation, it has become evident that companies continue to interpret the duty of vigilance as a mechanism for managing reputational risks rather than a substantive duty aimed at preventing actual harm to people and territories. Ambiguity regarding the scope of protected rights and the high evidentiary burden placed on communities have turned due diligence into a highly technical, costly, and inaccessible field for those who suffer the impacts.

This experience is not exceptional. Over more than twenty years of strategic litigation and community accompaniment at ProDESC, we have documented numerous renewable energy projects in Latin America that have advanced systematically over Indigenous territories without guaranteeing free, prior, and informed consent, reproducing practices of land grabbing, community fragmentation, criminalisation, and violence, particularly against women defending the community territory and rights. In these contexts, due diligence has not operated as a material limit on corporate power capable of mitigating the climate crisis but rather, in many cases, as a device that legally legitimises projects presented as green or sustainable, even when they are sustained through structural rights violations.

The Pilmaiquén case, in Mapuche Williche territory in southern Chile, reinforces this critical reading through an additional dimension: the leadership of Indigenous women of the Global South in the struggles against green colonialism. The defence of the river has been led primarily by women such as the Machi Millaray Huichalaf: her political and spiritual work combines territorial protection, community life, and cultural identity to oppose hydroelectric projects promoted by the Norwegian state-owned company Statkraft. These projects have been financed without adequately guaranteeing the right to consultation or consent of the Mapuche Williche people, disregarding their spiritual, cultural, and political relationship with the river and imposing a development model disconnected from Indigenous self-determination. This process has generated recurring patterns of criminalisation, selective prosecution, and gender-based violence against women human rights defenders, revealing how the energy transition can deepen structural inequalities when imposed on historically racialised territories.

Through a transnational strategy, Mapuche communities supported by ProDESC and the Initiative for Transnational Justice activated a procedure before the Norwegian National Contact Point of the OECD, shifting the centre of accountability to the parent company in the Global North. This process has made it possible to internationally denounce the territorial, cultural, and spiritual impacts of the hydroelectric projects and to highlight the violence against women human rights defenders in a space typically dominated by technical language about responsible business conduct. The Pilmaiquén experience shows that a truly decolonising approach to law must not only question its own categories but also recognise Indigenous women as central political subjects of the transition, dismantle the supposed neutrality of corporate responsibility mechanisms and acknowledge that without self-determination, without free, prior and informed consent and without effective protection for defenders, there can be no meaningful discussion of a just transition.

Towards a transition from the Global South

In light of the structural limits of what is commonly referred to as the law of the energy transition as it currently prevails, it becomes essential to imagine and build alternative transition pathways: energy processes anchored in the self-determination of peoples, the centrality of territories, and the recognition of legal pluralism. From the Global South, the struggles of Indigenous communities and Indigenous women human rights defenders compel us to envision a feminist transition from the South, one that does not reduce energy justice to emission reduction metrics or to green financial flows but instead situates it within relations of power, historical responsibility, and respect for spiritual ties with nature. A truly just transition requires a reflexive dismantling of the technical neutrality of law, one of the key focuses of the dialogue being held at the newly established Centre for Advanced Studies RefLex. In this context, it should also contest the corporate capture of sustainability and redirect normative frameworks toward the effective protection of life. It is not only a matter of changing the energy matrix but of transforming the logics that determine who pays, who benefits, and who is considered expendable in the name of the climate.

The post Who Decides, Who Pays, Who is Sacrificed appeared first on Verfassungsblog.