Programme Description
The Academy of European Law (AEL) holds two summer courses each year on The Law of the European Union and on Human Rights.
The 2026 course on Human Rights – Imagining Planetary Legal Orders engages with whether the international legal order – an order between peoples, a legal order governing relations between states, and one that expanded to include humans as legal subjects – can tackle the climate and ecological crises without challenging its anthropocentric foundations. It asks whether expanding legal subjectivity to the non-human world is conceptually possible and whether such recognition is legally, politically and normatively desirable.
The course takes the ecological predicament seriously and asks whether international law can be enlisted to imagine planetary orders between humans and non-human entities. We will explore this by examining the international law tradition as an anthropocentric ordering project and scholarship that has imagined planetary futures beyond anthropocentrism.
We will take stock of the relationship between international law and the climate and ecological crises by examining rules, principles and regimes that protect the environment (such as the Rio Framework Conventions) and those that enable the crises (such as the Lotus principle and the principle of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources). We will also study how international law, forged in colonial encounters and relations between diverse peoples, nations and states, has justified domination and opened avenues for resistance, and what these histories teach us when imagining a law open to encounters between humans and non-humans.
We will study four approaches that challenge the anthropocentric framework: rights of nature; post-human legalities; international law and geography; and legal scholarship on the planetary. We will examine how these approaches define the problem and propose solutions for the environmental crisis, climate crisis or the Anthropocene. Working with NGOs pursuing activism that challenges anthropocentrism, we will discuss how each approach would formulate legal responses to governing relations between humans and non-humans.
The course will combine lectures and interactive exercises.
Research Themes