Struggling with climate change: environmental rights as children’s rights and the potential of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child

Climate change - which is becoming visible in harmful consequences across the glob - has a disproportionate impact on children. If a children’s dimension has not been entirely neglected in environmental treaties, a comprehensive regime that extends environmental human rights to children is still absent. This article contends that, the Convention of the Rights of the Child (CRC) being the most ratified human rights instrument dedicated to children’s rights, which uniquely specifically refers to the dangers and risks of environmental pollution, its monitoring body has unique institutional potential to interpret environmental law from a children based perspective contributing to fighting climate change, in line with a positive trend manifested in the General Comments and Concluding Observations that are moving from indirect considerations to explicit mainstreaming of climate change issues and related obligations. The pending individual Communication promises as well to be historic in its scale of attempting to hold multiple countries accountable at the same time. It is argued that if these positive notes would be reinforced through a systemic integration of the Paris Agreement and the UNFCCC within the CRC context as constituting relevant rules of international law applicable to the relation between the parties according to the Article 31 (3) (c) of the Vienna Convention, international environmental standards relevant to the substantive guidance that States parties to the CRC must comply with could find a way to be ‘operationalized’ and made ‘justiciable’ beyond the limits of the international human rights contentious cases.