Reflections On A Prospective Legal Protection of Environmental Refugees

Abstract

Prospective thoughts on a legal protection for ecological refugees. Major migrations induced by environmental disasters are expected for the next decades. The design of adequate prevention and mitigation tools comes up against the low reliability of migration scenarii accounting for environmental risks and societal vulnerability and resilience. Thus legal instruments to protect ecological refugees are lacking. The structural limits of the international law based on the respect of State sovereignty and of the principle of non-interference, as well as those limits of the modern humanitarian international law and international environmental law do not allow to construct a protection tied to the real issue. The legal protection of ecological refugees must adapt and invent new legal concepts and mechanisms like the creation of an international protection and the use of notions like the ones of ecological interference, environmental asylum rights, fortuitous event, failed State.

Note: The downloadable document is in French.

Keywords: Environmental and climate migrations, legal protection, internal displaced persons, refugees, stateless persons, responsibility, UNHCR