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On 17 June 2026, the European Parliament adopted new rules on plants obtained by certain new genomic techniques (NGTs), including the famous genetic scissors CRISPR-Cas9, and the food and feed made from these plants. This is the most radical change in the regulation of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the EU in the last three decades, starting in 1988 when the European Commission tabled its first proposal to regulate GMOs. Depending on the number and type of modifications of a plant’s genome, the new rules exempt certain NGT plants and their products from investment-choking GMO rules under Directive 2001/18 (NGT1) and lower the risk assessment requirements for certain other NGT plants (NGT2).

In the ongoing geopolitical biotech brawl, it is not just EU policymakers and the legislature who must catch up with technological progress by adopting new rules, but also European consumers who now need to adjust their risk perception of genetic modification or will be nudged to do so. Certain NGOs, as well as the organic sector opposed to GMOs, may now consider questioning the new legislation or any delegated acts adopted under it, particularly as regards whether a high level of protection of human health and the environment has been maintained, where the GMO requirements on risk assessment, traceability and post-market monitoring are effectively removed for plants and products developed using the new techniques. However, the path for this change has been paved long before, with decades of longitudinal data and experience gained in environmental and human health risk assessments concerning conventional genetic modification, and no new hazards have been identified.

Biases Facing Sustainability Benefits

In fact, not only has scientific evidence overwhelmingly shown that NGTs have been regulated more heavily under the existing GMO rules than their scientific risk profiles justified, but research has also shown how the regulation is biased against new techniques. On the latter point, it is difficult to explain in any other way why conventional plant breeding or conventional techniques of genetic modification, such as ionising radiation, have not been subject to the same authorisation requirements as NGTs, despite not being technologically superior in terms of safety. One may dispute how the EU came to stretch the doctrinal logic of applying the precautionary principle to the point of undervaluing new information on evolving technologies, idealising full scientific certainty and ignoring trade-offs and foregone benefits. All of this put the question of GMOs out of the European consumers’ minds. As the Commission’s Food Safety Eurobarometer found out, very few consumers in the EU are actually afraid of GMOs – an outcome not surprising, given that European consumers almost never encounter authorised GMO products on their plates. Be it the forever-lingering trauma of a series of food crises in the 1990s or the expert confirmation bias following GMO scientific controversies in the public eye, the tide has gradually turned: policymakers have changed narratives and started to frame questions about the consumer acceptability of NGTs in different terms, namely, in terms of benefits for sustainability.

A Conservative Change

EU policymakers have shown receptiveness to the warning that falling behind in the platformisation of gene-editing technology in the age of AI would cost the EU its future direly. At the point, when the law is too slow to respond to technological change, the line between law and technology may snap, and a technological disruption may bring about a change in legal path dependencies. However, only to a degree. Following the 2021 Commission’s study on NGTs, the Commission’s proposal went head-to-head with the political resistance to technological change brought by genome editing. In response, the Commission’s proposal was rather conservative: after all, authorisation will be avoided only if the NGT1 plant is altered by no more than 20 base pairs and does not include the trait of pesticide resistance or the production of a known insecticidal substance. In practice, for example, whenever genetic engineers insert or substitute nucleotide bases of DNA, which form complementary pairs (adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G), thymine (T), and uracil (U)) at no more than three gene modification sites of a gene sequence that encodes a protein, they act like conventional breeders and escape authorisation.

Additionally, other techniques are considered equivalent to conventional breeding, such as inserting contiguous DNA from the breeder’s gene pool. It is yet unclear whether genetic engineers could produce one plant in this way, which would be considered an NGT1 type, and then modify the plant a second time and categorise the new plant again as an NGT1 type. The Commission is empowered to increase or decrease the maximum allowed number and the types of genetic modifications based on new scientific evidence, but the distinctions already rest on a thin scientific basis. The Commission can also adopt delegated acts to remove references to prohibited traits for the NGT1 type or to add new traits to the list.

For some, the extent to which NGTs may be used to modify plants without undergoing authorisation is perceived as too risky; for others, the extent is too limited to attract meaningful research and investment.

Changing Risk Perception Under Framing Forces

Consumer research and some limited experiments with citizen deliberation have demonstrated that even if the lowering of a level of protection is only perceived, consumers consider at least three ethical imperatives shaping their risk acceptance: the imperative that the freedom of choice is not compromised, that life itself becomes not one’s property and that benefits are not only mentioned but rightly communicated and seen. These three imperatives have translated largely into technical debates in the trilogue.

The first debate concerned traceability and labelling. In the citizen jury on NGTs convened as an experiment by researchers from the University of Bayreuth in 2024, labelling was the most divisive issue among participants and provoked deep ethical resentment. In the end, a consensus was reached on a policy recommendation to list NGTs separately from GMOs on ingredient lists. However, with NGTs, the ethical dilemma and consumer preferences become a technical problem. The regulatory bias created not only tougher regulations but also resulted in NGTs falling into a de facto regulatory limbo – a factual impossibility of receiving authorisation. The GMO rules were drafted for the reality of transgenic GMOs with foreign DNA and prescribe detection, identification, and quantification (DIQ) methods for the genetic change along the authorisation dossier for placing on the market and deliberate release. For NGTs, the most challenging, if not impossible, is the identification method attributing a genomic change to a specific modification event, i.e., distinguishing between spontaneous mutation and deliberate technical intervention, such as using conventional breeding techniques or CRISPR-Cas9 scissors. The adopted NGT regulation introduces an important change regarding the requirement to provide DIQ methods: it exempts NGT1 plants from this requirement, while for NGT2 plants, it allows citing technical unfeasibility to avoid submitting DIQ methods. As a result, NGT plants and their products will likely be untraceable by analytical methods, and products will not require specific labelling, since only seeds will need to be labelled as NGT. Without technically robust traceability, labelling of credence attributes will unlikely be effectively enforced, particularly in global supply chains where EU trading partners do not impose similar traceability requirements.

The consumer may ask why not invest more in developing DIQ methods and delay relaxing or eliminating the authorisation requirements until such methods are available. Why not, for example, sequence large numbers of samples from each lot of seeds sold to farmers and build a gigantic database of DNA sequences that could help determine whether a given plant has been modified using NGTs and therefore requires labelling? Apart from the uncertainty, cost and practical impossibility of such an endeavour, it may never produce scientifically relevant results. Mutations occur continuously in plant genomes, and no parent and offspring are genetically identical. Such all-encompassing traceability would also affect conventionally bred plants and those modified through conventional genetic modification techniques. The task of identifying NGT plants appears, for now, impossible to achieve, even if one would follow raw laymen’s imaginaries. Economists also suggest that if consumers were confronted with the true cost of satisfying their ethical preferences, they would often be unwilling to pay. Research further indicates that such labels may affect consumers’ purchasing decisions when their preferences are revealed through market behaviour in the short run, but that effect also depends on the design of the label. It also suggests that when products are placed on the market without distinguishable labelling, consumer acceptance is not significantly shaped by GMO origin as a credence attribute. Given these economic and scientific constraints, technological change and the corresponding adjustment in consumer behaviour appear inevitable.

Patents and Access to Benefits

As regards patenting, the adopted legislative text confirmed the possibility of seeking patents for NGT plants under the existing system of protection. That system comprises the protection of rights and exceptions therefrom (breeders’ exemption, farmers’ privilege), which are regulated at the international level (e.g., the UPOV Convention; the European Patent Convention) and at the EU level, with relevance to biotechnological inventions (Directive 98/44/EC). For example, traits or sequences produced naturally or by essentially biological means (crossing or selection) have been excluded from patentability since 2017 under the Guidelines for Examination at the European Patent Office (Part G – Chapter II-40).

Citizens have been particularly sensitive around the question of who owns the biotechnology and how the ownership will be licensed or enforced, particularly vis-à-vis small farmers and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). In the Schloss Thurnau citizen jury, for example, the jury demanded a no-patent policy regarding NGTs and an open-source-like approach with utmost transparency. In the first reading, the European Parliament also introduced amendments to exclude patent protection for NGT plants. The question of patent protection became the most hotly debated issue in the legislative process, with the Council spending considerable time resolving the deadlock. The change came only with the Danish presidency, which managed to broker the deal that accepted the patentability of NGT plants as an important component for investment-inducing rules, following several assurances from the Commission. After the trilogue, the legislative text mandated the Commission to monitor the market with regard to patenting practices and their impacts, including the exclusion of SMEs. The Commission will assess the functioning of the licensing platforms, whether they provide transparency on patents and enable SMEs to license under fair and reasonable conditions. The Commission will draft a code of conduct and ensure that SMEs have access to support and guidance on plant-related patent matters. The Commission is also bound to fulfil its reporting duties by submitting a report on the implementation and impact of the NGT regulation (an obligation which the Commission did not fulfil in relation to Directive 2001/18) and a report on the functioning of the code of conduct. Although the law is unlikely to change in the future, the Commission will prospectively examine whether legislative change or soft-law clarification is needed regarding patentability criteria for inventions relating to plant genetic information, the concept of essentially biological processes, and the conditions for compulsory cross-licensing. However, limitations on any prospective change stem from the international obligations of the EU and its Member States regarding the protection of intellectual property rights.

The third debate focuses on the benefits of NGTs and their applications. A considerable number of applications are in development pipelines and promise superior crops in terms of their sustainability impacts. For example, there are cisgenic potatoes resistant to late blight and cisgenic apples resistant to scab, which result in a substantial reduction in fungicide treatments. For crops mostly cultivated outside the EU, NGTs are used to develop bananas to slow down their browning or to prevent Panama disease in rice. The data used in the impact assessment point out that European consumers are now more willing to accept the technology. Some studies have shown that if consumers are aware of the benefits of GMOs or NGTs, their willingness to buy increases. On that note, the new rules encourage voluntary labelling that emphasises the sustainability traits of such products. In the Schloss Thurnau citizen jury, it was recommended that governments strongly support projects at schools and educational institutions to educate about NGTs/GMOs. Recent research has shown that consumers are eager to learn more about NGTs in an unbiased, well-communicated way and to understand their benefits, but extrapolating sustainability consequences from labels of single traits may be difficult for consumers. Perhaps an inspiration in this regard may be found in specific provisions of other legal acts, such as the EU AI Act’s provisions on AI literacy. Biotech literacy could offer a new way of thinking about how to shape future debates over the regulation of biotechnological inventions.

Technological Promise and Inevitability

In 1992, the Bureau Européen des Unions de Consommateurs wrote to the European Commission in response to its GMO directive proposal that if it turns out that – for specific categories of products – there is no need for an extended assessment, then a more rapid procedure can be agreed on at a future date. However, before this can happen, experience with assessments needs to be gathered. That day came today. From an investment perspective, it remains to be seen whether the limit on the number of genetic modifications permitted for NGT1 plants will be sufficient to provide a meaningful incentive to invest. From a consumer perspective, NGT-derived products are expected to reach the market eventually, whether in five or fifteen years, depending on the development timelines of individual products. From a market perspective, following a two-year implementation period, greater diversification of plant varieties and products can be expected, as cultivation and placing of NGT products on the market will no longer be subject to prohibitively high regulatory costs. Technology has matured, but the risk perception that shaped a high level of protection has not kept pace with the leap it has made. Technological progress has outpaced that perception and eventually made the technology inevitable.

The post New Genomic Techniques in Food and Feed appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

We, public law scholars, have come, after careful consideration, to the difficult conclusion that we support the replacement of those high-ranking public office-holders who have remained in office from the previous autocratic regime. At the same time, we consider it justified for Parliament to exercise self-restraint in the election of new public office-holders.

After the parliamentary elections, the Prime Minister called on the President of the Republic, as well as the presidents of the Curia (Supreme Court), the National Judicial Office, the Constitutional Court, the State Audit Office, the Hungarian Competition Authority, the Media Authority, and the Prosecutor General, to resign. The Prime Minister further stated that, should these public office-holders decline to do so, Parliament would remove them from office by amending the Fundamental Law.

Parliament may amend the Fundamental Law by a two-thirds majority. No public institution may review constitutional amendments for their substance. If the President of the Republic vetoes an amendment duly adopted in accordance with the prescribed procedure, and the Constitutional Court reviews the amendment, both institutions thereby act in violation of the Fundamental Law. However, the power of the two-thirds parliamentary majority is not unlimited. The removal of public office-holders is an unprecedented step that may be justified only by exceptional and compelling reasons, pursued for justifiable purposes, and carried out through appropriate legal means.

The exceptional reason for the replacement of these public office-holders is the restoration of constitutional democracy and the rule of law. Several years ago, the European Parliament, taking into account the opinions of experts, concluded that Hungary could no longer be considered a democracy but had become a new form of electoral autocracy. The Court of Justice of the European Union and the European Court of Human Rights have held in significant cases that the transformation of certain constitutional institutions and public offices was arbitrary and unlawful. A substantial body of authoritative research supports the conclusion that, in recent years, these public law institutions have not advanced the functioning of democracy and the rule of law but have instead become instruments of one-person rule. Public law institutions have lost the integrity required by the rule of law.

Public office-holders, from the President of the Republic to the judges of the Constitutional Court and from the Prosecutor General to the President of the Curia, played a significant role in the establishment and maintenance of the autocratic regime. Through their decisions and omissions, they share responsibility for the massive human rights violations suffered by marginalised individuals and groups, as well as for systemic abuses of public assets, the transfer of public goods into private hands, and the resulting social injustices. Because these public office-holders remained loyal to autocratic power until the very end, they have irreparably lost their credibility. Whatever decisions they may make in the future, they have proven themselves to be decision-makers beholden to political power and prone to bias, rather than officials guided by the spirit and letter of the law. Their continued tenure would obstruct the restoration of constitutional democracy and the rule of law. The credible functioning of public law institutions is possible only under new leadership.

The two-thirds majority may, through self-limiting legal measures, ensure that the necessary personnel changes contribute to the restoration of constitutional democracy and the rule of law. First, it is necessary to avoid manipulative solutions and legal tricks of the kind that characterised the autocratic period. Although procedurally correct, changes that conceal their true purposes constitute acts of bad faith and therefore cannot serve as building blocks of constitutional democracy and the rule of law.

Second, it is advisable to ensure that urgent personnel changes do not entail rapid and unconsidered changes to the constitutional structure and the allocation of powers. A stable framework can be properly established through a comprehensive constitutional process, rather than through extraordinary interventions compelled by an exceptional situation.

Third, self-limiting personnel changes can be the first step towards restoring checks and balances if the selection of new public office-holders takes place through a transparent procedure, with the involvement of professionally recognised bodies and the consideration of ethical criteria. In this exceptional and transitional situation, this can help ensure that Parliament elects credible, impartial, and capable individuals in place of those who served the autocratic regime in public office.

June 18, 2026.

Signed by

Balogh, Judit, habil. Associate Professor, University of Debrecen Faculty of Law

Barcsi, Tamás, Associate Professor, Head of the Department of Legal Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Pécs Faculty of Law

Bartha, Ildikó, Professor, Head of the Department of European and International Law, University of Debrecen Faculty of Law

Bayer, Judit, habil. Associate Professor, Budapest University of Economics and Business

Bárd, Petra, Professor, Radboud University, Nijmegen, Faculty of Law

Bencze, Mátyás, Professor, University of Szeged Faculty of Law / Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies

Boda-Balogh, Éva, Adjunct Professor, University of Debrecen Faculty of Law

Chronowski, Nóra, DSc., Research Professor, Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies

Csapody, Tamás, habil. Associate Professor, Semmelweis University

Cserne, Péter, Professor, University of Aberdeen, School of Law

Deák, Izabella, Assistant Lecturer, University of Debrecen Faculty of Law / Researcher, Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies

Drinóczi, Tímea, DSc., Professor, Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius

Farkas, Lilla, Associate Professor, ELTE University Faculty of Social Sciences

Fazekas, Flóra, Assistant Professor, University of Debrecen Faculty of Law

Ficsor, Krisztina, Assistant Professor, University of Debrecen Faculty of Law

Fleck, Zoltán, Professor, ELTE University Faculty of Law

Fodor, László, DSc., Professor, University of Debrecen Faculty of Law

Győrfi, Tamás, Professor, University of Aberdeen, School of Law

Hoffmann, István, DSc., Professor, ELTE University Faculty of Law / Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies

Hoffmann, Tamás, Associate Professor, Corvinus University of Budapest / Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies

Kadlót, Erzsébet, Honorary Associate Professor, University of Szeged Faculty of Law

Kirs, Eszter, habil. Associate Professor, Corvinus University of Budapest

Kovács, Ágnes, Assistant Professor, ELTE University Faculty of Social Sciences

Kovács, Kriszta, habil. Associate Professor, ELTE University Faculty of Social Sciences / Visiting Senior Researcher, WZB Berlin

Körtvélyesi, Zsolt, Associate Professor, ELTE University Faculty of Social Sciences

Kövér-Van Til, Ágnes, Professor, ELTE University Faculty of Social Sciences

Lattmann, Tamás, Associate Professor, Head of the Department of Social Sciences, Tomori Pál College / University of New York in Prague

Lux, Ágnes, Associate Professor, ELTE University Faculty of Social Sciences

Majtényi, Balázs, Professor, Head of the Human Rights and politics Department, ELTE University Faculty of Social Sciences

Mészáros, Gábor, Assistant Professor, University of Pécs Faculty of Law

Mráz, Attila, Assistant Professor, ELTE University Faculty of Humanities

Nagy, Krisztina, Assistant Professor, Budapest University of Technology and Economics Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences

Pap, András László, DSc., Professor, ELTE University Faculty of Economics / Research Professor, Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies

Perecz, László, Professor, Budapest University of Technology and Economics Faculty of Economic and Social Sciences / ELTE University Faculty of Economics

Polyák, Gábor, Professor, ELTE University Faculty of Humanities, Director, Institute for the Theory of Art and Media Studies

Sándor, Judit, Professor, Central European University

Sólyom, Péter, habil. Associate Professor, Head of the Department of Constitutional Law, University of Debrecen Faculty of Law / Senior Research Fellow, Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies

Szente, Zoltán, DSc., Research Professor, Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies

Szentes, Ágota, Researcher, Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies

Tóth, Gábor Attila, DSc., Professor, University of Debrecen Faculty of Law / Semmelweis University

Tóth, Judit, Associate Professor, University of Szeged Faculty of Law

Varju, Márton, habil. Associate Professor, ELTE University Faculty of Social Sciences / Acting Director, Centre for Social Sciences, Institute for Legal Studies

(Drafted by Kriszta Kovács and Gábor Attila Tóth)

 Scholars of legal studies and related disciplines, as well as judges, lawyers, and other legal professionals, are welcome to sign this open letter. Among the more than 300 additional signatories so far are: András Baka, former judge of the European Court of Human Rights and former President of the Supreme Court; János Kis, philosopher and Professor Emeritus at Central European University, former leading figure of the democratic opposition to the communist regime; Gabriella Ilonszki, DSc., Professor Emerita of Comparative Political Science and Parliamentarism at Corvinus University of Budapest; Gábor Halmai, Professor Emeritus of Constitutional Law at ELTE University and the European University Institute in Florence; Miklós Szabó, Professor Emeritus of Legal Theory at the University of Miskolc; Péter Róna, Professor at Blackfriars Hall, University of Oxford; Judit Lévayné Fazekas, Professor of EU Law at Széchenyi István University; László Majtényi, DSc., Hungary’s first Data Protection Ombudsman; András Bozóki, DSc., Professor of Political Theory at Central European University; András Földi, corresponding member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences and Professor of Roman and Comparative Law at ELTE University; Andrew Arato, Professor of Social and Constitutional Theory at The New School, New York; Erzsébet Szalayné Sándor, Professor of International and European Law at the University of Pécs; and Andrea Krizsán, Professor of Public Policy and Gender Studies at Central European University.

International scholars are welcome to sign the open letter, which is available on the website reconstitutio.hu. Alternatively, they may send an email to the following address: reconstitutio@gmail.com

The post Open Letter to the Hungarian Parliament on the Replacement of Certain Public Office-Holders appeared first on Verfassungsblog.

In July 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) issued Advisory Opinion 32/25 on the Climate Emergency and Human Rights, responding to a request submitted by Chile and Colombia in January 2023. The Opinion did what many had anticipated but few expected to see so fully realized: it recognized the right to a healthy climate as a standalone human right, declared a jus cogens norm prohibiting irreversible environmental harm, and affirmed the legal personhood of nature. These are not incremental developments. They are structural shifts in international environmental law, and they did not appear from nowhere. They are the culmination of more than two decades of jurisprudential construction — a story that begins, quietly, with an Indigenous community in Nicaragua in 2001.

This post traces that arc: from the earliest seeds of environmental protection through rights to life and property, through the transformative pivot of nature rights, through the consolidation of contentious jurisdiction in Lhaka Honhat v. Argentina and La Oroya v. Peru, to the doctrinal summit of AO 32/25. It also examines what comes next — including the petitions still pending before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR or Commission), as will be explained below, and the September 2025 filing by several youth plaintiffs against the United States in Juliana Youth v. United States, which tests whether the Commission is finally ready to hold a major emitter to account.

Indirect to Autonomous: The Long Construction of the Right to a Healthy Environment

The IACtHR did not arrive at environmental rights fully formed. Its earliest environmental jurisprudence was indirect and instrumental: the environment mattered because environmental harm threatened other, more established rights.

In Mayagna (Sumo) Awas Tingni v. Nicaragua (2001), the Court recognized, through a joint separate opinion of three judges, that the habitat of an Indigenous community was integral to their cultural identity and communal life — a dimension of the right to property under Article 21 of the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR). Four years later, in Yakye Axa Indigenous Community v. Paraguay (2005), the Court held that the denial of access to ancestral lands constituted a violation of the right to a dignified life under Article 4. Environmental degradation was actionable, but only because it threatened human beings whose other rights the Court already recognized.

This indirect approach was not a weakness of vision so much as a constraint of jurisdiction. The ACHR does not mention the right to a healthy environment. That right appears in Article 11 of the Additional Protocol (the San Salvador Protocol), but violations of that article are not subject to individual petition before the Court. The Court worked within those constraints — until it decided it did not have to.

The turning point was Advisory Opinion 23/17, issued in November 2017 in response to a request by Colombia concerning environmental obligations in the context of large-scale infrastructure projects in the Caribbean Sea. The Court used the occasion to establish three things that would reshape the landscape of international environmental law.

First, it recognized the right to a healthy environment as an autonomous right under Article 26 of the ACHR — directly justiciable, with both individual and collective dimensions, extending to present and future generations. Second, it became the first international human rights tribunal to recognize an extraterritorial jurisdictional link based not on physical control over persons or territory, but on control over domestic activities with transboundary effects — opening the door to “diagonal” climate claims, where individuals in one state hold another accountable for harms arising from activities within that state’s territory (see, i.e., De Bellis). Third, it elaborated a duty of due diligence with real content: states must regulate, supervise, and monitor activities capable of causing significant transboundary harm; apply the precautionary principle where serious or irreversible damage is at stake; cooperate with and inform other states; and guarantee access to information, public participation, and justice in environmental decision-making.

From Advisory to Binding: Due Diligence in Contentious Cases

Advisory opinions carry authority, but not the binding force of judgments. The question after 2017 was how quickly the Court would translate its advisory doctrine into contentious jurisdiction. The answer came faster than expected.

In Lhaka Honhat Association v. Argentina (2020), the Court recognized, for the first time in a contentious case, the right to a healthy environment as an autonomous and directly enforceable right under Article 26. The judgment also confirmed that the duty of due diligence requires ex ante measures — states cannot wait for harm to materialize. They must monitor, regulate, and supervise activities by private entities as well as public authorities, and failure to do so constitutes a violation of the Convention regardless of whether the ultimate harm is caused by non-state actors.

Three years later, Residents of La Oroya v. Peru (2023) took the doctrine further in two important directions. First, it extended the autonomous right to a healthy environment beyond Indigenous populations to the general public — the residents of La Oroya had suffered severe air and water contamination from a century-old metallurgical complex operated by both state and private foreign investors. The Court held Peru responsible for failing to regulate those activities adequately, drawing explicitly on the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and holding that due diligence obligations apply equally to public and private enterprises.

Second, and perhaps more consequentially for what would come in AO 32/25, the Court adopted an explicitly ecocentric framing. The right to a healthy environment, it held, protects components of the environment — forests, rivers, seas — as legal interests in themselves, independent of any demonstrated risk to individual human beings. States are obligated to protect nature not only for its instrumental value to humans but for its intrinsic significance. This was not yet a formal recognition of rights of nature, but it was the doctrinal foundation on which that recognition would be built.

The procedural dimensions of La Oroya also matter for climate litigation. The Court found Peru liable for withholding health risk information from affected residents and for failing to ensure meaningful participation in environmental decision-making — violations grounded in Articles 13 and 23 of the ACHR. In a climate context, this reasoning obligates states not only to reduce emissions but to disclose the nature and pace of climate-related risks and to enable affected communities to shape both mitigation and adaptation policy.

The Commission’s Role: Petitions, Resolutions, and the Paradigm Shift

Before turning to AO 32/25, it is worth tracing the parallel evolution of the IACHR, whose trajectory mirrors the Court’s but begins with a more cautious posture.

The Commission’s first encounter with a climate petition came in 2005, when the Inuit Circumpolar Conference filed a complaint against the United States alleging that US greenhouse gas emissions violated the human rights of Inuit peoples in the Arctic. The Commission rejected the petition, finding insufficient evidence of a direct causal link between US emissions and specific rights violations. The decision was widely criticized but reflected real evidentiary limits that climate attribution science had not yet overcome.

The Arctic Athabaskan Council filed a comparable petition against Canada in 2013, focused on black carbon emissions and their effects on Athabaskan peoples’ ability to exercise cultural rights on ancestral lands. That petition remains pending — and the legal landscape it faces today, after AO 23/17, Lhaka Honhat, La Oroya, and AO 32/25 bears almost no resemblance to the one that confronted the Inuit in 2006: in the intervening years, the Court has recognized the right to a healthy environment and significantly strengthened the protection of human rights in the context of environmental degradation and climate change.

The Commission’s posture shifted formally with Resolution 3/21 on the Climate Emergency, adopted jointly with the Special Rapporteur on Economic, Social, Cultural and Environmental Rights (REDESCA) in 2021. The Resolution is significant because it systematizes, for the first time in an IACHR instrument, the positive obligations of states in the context of climate change. It specifies that States must adopt and implement mitigation targets consistent with the Paris Agreement, assess cumulative GHG emissions in environmental impact assessments, implement adaptation measures, and remedy resulting damages — all subject to the due diligence principle derived from the Court’s evolving jurisprudence.

A third petition, filed in 2021 by Haitian children in Cité Soleil, alleges violations of the rights of the child, the right to dignity, the right to a healthy environment, and the right to judicial protection, arising from toxic waste disposal whose harms are aggravated by climate change. It is the first climate case filed after the Court’s green jurisprudence had fully matured, and it draws on children’s particular vulnerability — a framing that has proven effective in climate litigation globally.

AO 32/25: Three Doctrinal Breakthroughs

Advisory Opinion 32/25 is the culmination of this trajectory, and its three central innovations deserve to be understood in that context rather than in isolation.

The first is the articulation of a jus cogens norm prohibiting irreversible environmental harm. By elevating the prohibition to the highest tier of international law — one from which no derogation is permitted — the Court signals that catastrophic, irreversible harm to the environment is not a policy choice subject to balancing against economic interests, but a categorical legal prohibition. No international tribunal had previously made this claim. The implications for climate litigation are significant: arguments framed around the risk of irreversible warming could now invoke not just treaty obligations but peremptory norms.

The second is the recognition of nature’s legal personhood. Building directly on the ecocentric reasoning of La Oroya, the Court formalized what that judgment had implied: nature is not merely a resource that humans have an interest in protecting but a legal subject capable of bearing rights. This opens the possibility of litigation brought on behalf of ecosystems — rivers, forests, glaciers — as rights-holders in their own right, not merely as conditions for the enjoyment of human rights.

The third, and arguably most immediately actionable, is the recognition of the right to a healthy climate as a standalone human right derived from Article 26 of the ACHR. The Court characterized it as both individually justiciable and collectively held — capturing the intergenerational and interspecies dimensions that make climate change distinctive as a legal problem. And it imposed concrete state obligations: ambitious, binding, and progressively scaled mitigation targets calibrated to the 1.5°C global temperature goal.

The Opinion also elaborated the three procedural pillars associated with the Escazú Agreement — access to information, public participation, and access to justice — and addressed the disproportionate impact of climate change on structurally vulnerable populations, including children, Indigenous peoples, Afro-descendant communities, and campesino and fishing communities.

Inter-Americanization in Practice and What Comes Next

The significance of this jurisprudence extends well beyond the formal jurisdiction of the Court. The process of “Inter-Americanization” — the dynamic exchange between regional standards and domestic legal systems — means that these doctrines travel.

Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court demonstrated this in its 2022 Amazon Fund decision, explicitly citing Lhaka Honhat to ground the principle of prevention as customary international law and holding the federal government’s dismantling of Amazon Fund governance structures unconstitutional. Panama’s Supreme Court, in invalidating a copper mining concession in November 2023, relied directly on AO 23/17 and IACHR Resolution 3/21 to find that an outdated environmental impact assessment and the exclusion of affected communities from decision-making violated both constitutional and international human rights obligations.

The most consequential test of this trajectory may come from the petition filed on September 23, 2025, before the IACHR by fifteen former plaintiffs from Juliana v. United States, together with Our Children’s Trust and Dignity Rights Advocates. The petition argues that over five decades of US fossil fuel policies, pursued with knowledge of their harmful consequences, violate the petitioners’ rights under the American Declaration on the Rights and Duties of Man, including the rights to life, health, security, family, cultural benefits, and property. It also argues that the US Department of Justice’s sustained efforts to block the Juliana litigation from reaching trial — upheld by federal appellate courts — constitute a denial of access to justice and an effective remedy. Expressly invoking AO 32/25 and the International Court of Justice’s climate advisory opinion, the petition applies those rulings directly to the circumstances of one of the most prominent climate cases of the last decade.

Whether the Commission will receive the petition, and how it will engage with the question of causation that defeated the Inuit in 2006, will be a crucial test of how far the system has actually traveled. The science of climate attribution has advanced enormously since then; the jurisprudence has advanced even further.

Conclusion

The IACtHR did not set out to transform international environmental law. It responded, case by case, to the specific legal questions before it, building a body of doctrine through the patient accumulation of precedent. What it has built over twenty-five years is nevertheless remarkable: an autonomous right to a healthy environment, enforceable against both public and private actors; a duty of due diligence calibrated to the scale of foreseeable harm; extraterritorial jurisdiction grounded in effective control over damaging activities; and now, with AO 32/25, a jus cogens prohibition on irreversible environmental harm, the legal personhood of nature, and a standalone right to a safe climate.

The significance of this jurisprudence extends beyond the Inter-American system. Regional human rights courts increasingly occupy a central role in the development of climate-related obligations. The European Court of Human Rights, through cases such as Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz v. Switzerland, has recognized positive state duties to protect individuals from climate harms and has begun to articulate procedural and institutional requirements for climate governance. The African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights is now considering its own advisory opinion on climate change and human rights, presenting an opportunity to develop climate jurisprudence grounded in the African Charter and the continent’s particular experiences of vulnerability, development, and environmental justice. Across these systems, courts are confronting common questions concerning causation, risk, intergenerational equity, scientific uncertainty, and the relationship between environmental degradation and fundamental rights.

The IACtHR has emerged as one of the most ambitious participants in this judicial dialogue. Its jurisprudence has often moved beyond the approaches adopted elsewhere, not only recognizing environmental rights as autonomous and justiciable, but increasingly treating climate change as a structural human rights challenge requiring legal responses commensurate with the scale of the threat. Whether other regional tribunals embrace similar doctrinal innovations remains uncertain. Yet the IACtHR’s influence is already evident in the growing cross-referencing among international tribunals, the increasing reliance on scientific consensus as a basis for legal obligation, and the broader shift toward understanding environmental protection as a prerequisite for the enjoyment of human rights.

The same dynamic is now unfolding at the universal level. The recent advisory opinions of the IACtHR, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, and the International Court of Justice reflect a convergence around the proposition that climate change is not merely an environmental issue but a matter of legal obligation. Although each institution operates within a distinct mandate, together they contribute to an emerging body of principles concerning prevention, due diligence, cooperation, vulnerability, and the protection of future generations. The precise contours of these obligations remain contested, but the direction of travel is increasingly clear.

The petitions still moving through the Commission — Athabaskan, Cité Soleil, Juliana Youth — will determine whether these doctrinal achievements translate into accountability for specific states. That translation is never automatic. Advisory opinions establish frameworks; contentious proceedings test their practical consequences. Yet the legal infrastructure is now in place. The question is no longer whether climate change falls within the ambit of international human rights law. The question is whether the institutions charged with enforcing those rights are prepared to apply the principles they have articulated to the concrete realities of climate harm.

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