Will human rights save the anthropos from the Anthropocene? Rights-based environmental protection strategies and posthuman theory

In 2019, in the Urgenda case, the Dutch Supreme Court ruled that the Dutch state had to increasingly reduce its carbon emissions to fulfill its human rights obligations under international law to its citizens. Many saw the ruling as a promising historical precedent for international climate change litigation. Notwithstanding the importance of demanding climate action by state actors, this chapter argues that the reframing of the climate crisis as an international human rights issue has at least two important limitations. First, reference to anthropocentric human rights leads to the prioritizing of human over nonhuman life. Second, as posthuman and postcolonial theory shows, the anthropocentrism of human rights is conceptually and historically grounded on a hierarchical logic defining the ‘human’ in teleological terms, externalizing this human’s ‘Others’. The universal ‘human’ of human rights and the notion of a universal anthropos in ‘Anthropocene’ mask exclusions and related inequalities in power, responsibility and vulnerability characterizing the climate crisis. This chapter proposes that a critical analysis of the genealogy of international human rights shows that pursuing a human rights strategy in responding to climate change limits a more critical re-evaluation of what human threatened human and nonhuman life.