FAU CHREN Human Rights Colloquium on ‘Reflections on the Inter-American Court of Human Rights Advisory Opinion OC-32/25 on Climate Emergency and Human Rights’ with Professor Marcela Zúñiga Reyes and Professor Laura Clérico
Addressing the many human rights issues produced by the climate emergency appropriately is one of the core challenges of our time and also one of the central concerns addressed by FAU’s Transforming Human Rights project. But do the demands of climate and environmental justice also ground rights of nature, and what are the practical implications of such rights?
On 3 July 2025, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights issued its Advisory Opinion on Climate Emergency and Human Rights, described as ‘the result of the most participatory consultative process in the history of the Court,’ in which rights of nature were repeatedly referenced. FAU CHREN held a colloquium on the Advisory Opinion to examine the Opinion’s structure and its anticipated contribution to the development of innovative legal standards in the field of climate change on 14 July to discuss not only the status of rights of nature but also the Court’s interpretation of the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and the shared responsibility of States, underscoring their collective role in addressing the global climate crisis.
Speaker Bio
Marcela Zúñiga Reyes is a professor of Public International Law at the Faculty of Law, the Universidad Austral de Chile. She holds a PhD in Law (2024) and a Master’s degree in International Human Rights Law (2018) from the Universidad Diego Portales. Since 2024, she has been a collaborating professor for the Master’s Degree in Human Rights at the Universidad Europea de Madrid. Between 2022 and 2024, Professor Zúñiga Reyes served as a Research Fellow at the Friedrich Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, and in 2021, at the Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law and International Law in Heidelberg, Germany. Her research focuses on how the international obligation to redress human rights violations plays out at the national level, a topic addressed in her doctoral thesis on victims of institutional violence and social unrest. She has also undertaken research for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights on cases of enforced disappearance and for UNICEF Chile, focusing on the situation of children and adolescents in state care and migrant victims and witnesses of crimes.
Chair Bio
Professor Laura Clérico received her law degree from the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), a Master of Laws (LLM.), and a Ph.D. (Dr. iur.) from the University of Kiel (CAU). She is a researcher for CONICET (Argentina), a Constitutional Law professor at the University of Buenos Aires, and Social Rights at the University of Palermo (Buenos Aires). She is an honorary professor of Comparative Constitutional Law and Human Rights Protection at Friedrich Alexander University (FAU, Erlangen-Nürnberg). Currently, her research focuses on comparative constitutional law, the Inter-American Human Rights System, social, economic, and cultural rights, the inclusion of the gender perspective, and the incorporation of international human rights law in the jurisprudence of the Provincial Supreme Courts (sub-national level) of Argentina.
About the FAU CHREN Human Rights Colloquium
Organized by the FAU Research Center for Human Rights Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU CHREN), our inter- and transdisciplinary brings together scholars and practitioners to discuss current issues in human rights research and practice.
Colloquia are organised on a rolling basis and are co-convened by Dr. Janina Heaphy and Prof. Dr. Eva Pils. Events are invitation-only. Enquiries should be directed to the co-conveners and/or to humanrights@fau.de.
