Human Rights in the Energy Industry | Oliver Hailes

Dr Oliver Hailes is an Assistant Professor at the LSE Law School and an Associate at the Grantham Research Institute.

Oliver will be presenting the paper: Human Rights in the Energy Industry.

Abstract

Human rights have played a vital role in climate litigation, including international advisory proceedings. Such cases have sharpened attention to the potential contribution of international human rights law in the transition away from fossil fuels towards an energy regime based on renewable sources. But human rights do not merely limit the social and environmental harms of the energy industry, nor do they necessarily privilege the new regime over the old. Human rights serve a range of functions that may enable or disable the capacity of a given project—and, in aggregate, the global industry—to convert natural resources into end-use energy, whether heat, electricity, food, or fuel. To map the range of normative contributions made by human rights in the energy industry, this article induces four main functions from the case law, scholarly literature, and other forms of human rights practice: to allocate energy resources or products (distributive rights); to mandate public participation in the approval and regulation of energy projects (procedural rights); to secure energy assets from governmental interference, akin to investment treaty protection (commercial rights); and to prevent social and environmental harms arising from energy projects, whether local, transboundary, or global in scale (protective rights).

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