5 May 2025. Climate breakdown is already having major negative consequences for human rights around the globe. An immediate transition away from fossil fuels is required to avert the worst impacts. It can also serve as an opportunity to enact transformations to realign the economy with human rights obligations and truly sustainable development.
The United Nations (UN) system is paying more and more attention to how human rights can shape and inform such a just transition, but also how decarbonisation policies in their current design can affect human rights. In April 2025, FIDH’s expanding work on the topic was complemented with two new submissions to UN Special Rapporteurs.
The extraction and transformation of "critical minerals"
For an upcoming report to the UN General Assembly, the UN Special Rapporteur on climate change requested inputs on the positive and negative impacts on human rights of different sources, scales and stages of renewable energy development as part of a just transition, including in relation to "critical minerals".
FIDH authored a submission (in english only), together with its member organisations – Acción Ecológica (Ecuador), Association marocaine des droits humains (Morocco), Ligue des droits de l’Homme (France), Organisation guinéenne de défense des droits de l’homme et du citoyen (Guinea) – and its partner TrendAsia.
The contribution highlights human rights violations and abuses arising from a new wave of mining, fuelled by the demand for minerals embedded in renewable energy supply chains or serving the decarbonisation of other economic sectors. Present and future operations must avoid reproducing past injustices and protect communities, workers, Indigenous Peoples and environmental rights defenders.
The organisations stress the need for robust prevention and corporate accountability frameworks, along with a shift to a "human rights economy" that puts human rights at the heart of business models.
A transition that supports, not threatens, the defenders
Environmental rights defenders are essential in speaking up for the health of our planet, the rights of affected communities, and the search for sustainable solutions. They also exert pressure on governments to respect their climate obligations under international human rights law and the Paris Agreement.
The UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights defenders will focus her next thematic report on the situation of defenders working on climate change and a just transition. In the framework of its Observatory for the Protection of Human Rights Defenders, a FIDH-World Organisation Against Torture (OMCT) partnership), FIDH submitted concrete examples (in english only) of the initiatives and achievements of human rights defenders in transition efforts and the positive legal and judicial developments to protect their work.
At the same time, the submission documents cases of retaliation and repression defenders face – from state and non-state actors – when opposing large-scale projects or demanding a fossil fuel phaseout. The Observatory called on states, development finance institutions and businesses to secure a safe and enabling space for environmental rights defenders, reiterating its demands in another contribution by the Human Rights & Climate Change Working Group.