Programme Description
The Academy of European Law holds two summer courses each year, on The Law of the European Union and on Human Rights.
The 2026 course on Human Rights will be dealing with Imagining Planetary Legal Orders. The international legal order emerged as an order between peoples. It then became a legal order that governed relations between states and expanded to include humans as legal subjects, recognizing the protection of human rights and investor rights. As a legal order centered on humans and states, can international law tackle the climate and ecological crises without challenging its anthropocentric foundations? Is the expansion of legal subjectivity towards the non-human world conceptually possible? Is such recognition legally, politically and normatively desirable?
This summer course takes the contemporary ecological predicament seriously and asks: can international law be enlisted to imagine planetary orders, that is, orders not just between humans, but also between humans and non-human entities?
We will explore this question with two goals in mind: examining the international law tradition as an anthropocentric ordering project and examining legal scholarship that has imagined planetary futures beyond anthropocentrism.
The International Legal Order & the Ecological Crises. The first task of the summer course is to take stock of the relationship between international law and the climate and ecological crises. On the one hand, we will examine the basic rules, principles and regimes of international law that protect the environment, such as the Rio Framework Conventions, and the international law that enables the climate and ecological crises, such as the Louts principle and the principle of Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources.
On the other hand, international law, for better or worse, was forged in the colonial encounter and in the encounter between peoples, nations, states and individuals from different cultures, ideologies, religions. We will examine international law as it has shaped these –violent and peaceful– encounters, justifying domination and opening avenues for resistance. What can we learn from these histories of international law, when imagining a law open to the encounter between humans and non-humans?
Imagining Planetary Legal Orders. The second task is to study four approaches that challenge the traditional anthropocentric framework: rights of nature; post-human legalities; international law & geography and legal scholarship on the planetary.
We will study these approaches from a theoretical and practice-oriented perspective asking how these approaches define the problem and find solutions to tackle the environmental crisis, climate crisis or the Anthropocene.
The main ideas and scholarly contributions by exponents of these approaches will be studied. Then, we will collaborate with one or more NGOs pursuing activism that challenges the anthropocentric framework. How would each of these approaches formulate a different legal response to the question how to govern relations between human and non-humans?
The course will combine lectures and interactive exercises.
Research Themes