At the end of 2023, the Interdisciplinary Observatory on Climate Change prepared, in collaboration with the Law, Environment and Justice in the Anthropocene Research Group (JUMA/NIMA/PUC-Rio) and the Inter-American Human Rights System Study and Research Group (GEP-SIDH/NDH/PUC-Rio), a document with written observations on the Advisory Opinion on climate issues for the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR).

Recently, the document was incorporated into the global climate litigation database of the Sabin Center for Climate Change Law at Columbia University, a platform on which various amicus curiae submissions to the Court’s Advisory Opinion are gathered.

Advisory Opinions are forms of jurisprudence of the IACHR in non-contentious cases, and the request in question was made by the representations of Colombia and Chile for the Court to express its opinion on the climate emergency and human rights. Written observations are a way for various actors, including academic and civil society institutions, to intervene and contribute to the drafting of opinions, similar to the figure of amicus curiae in contentious cases. The observations developed by the OIMC, JUMA and GEP-SIDH groups focused on the relationship between climate, the environment and human rights and on the centrality of the concepts of climate justice and environmental racism in interpreting the human rights crisis associated with the climate emergency.