Climate crisis and the rights based transformation of law: Developments in international law and the European Court of Human Rights

Our world is warming due to human activities, and this will lead to irreversible and devastating consequences in its ecosystem. Therefore, humanity is facing a climate crisis. As a phenomenon that will seriously affect human organizations, the climate crisis is also a subject of law that regulates social life. Thus, this study will examine how the climate crisis can be tackled through the law. Law is a phenomenon that ensures capitalism and liberal property rights. Thus, it is among the perpetrators of the climate crisis. In this vein, in the first chapter of this study, the limitations of existing anthropocentric law in the face of the climate crisis will be examined, and it will be discussed how this anthropocentric paradigm can be overcome. There are various suggestions how the law should transform in the face of the climate crisis. The perspective that is commonly accepted and mostly followed by international environmental law, which is the first area of law regulating climate crisis, is to remain within the anthropocentric paradigm and to overcome the law's limitations through the concept of sustainable development and human rights law. Therefore, in the second chapter of the study, the transformation of international environmental law in the face of the climate crisis will be assessed. However, international environmental law has not made it possible to tackle the climate crisis adequately, which has created a tendency in the civil society to compel their states to take sufficient climate action through the courts. This tendency led to the emergence of a new type of litigation form in the legal world called climate litigation. In that sense, several essential examples of climate litigation, which have become one of the main tools for impelling states to take comprehensive climate action, will be examined in the thesis. It will be examined within the last chapter of this study how the European Court of Human Rights, can address the climate crisis through the norms of the European Convention on Human Rights, although it has not decided yet on any climate litigation but has a very crucial position for climate action.