By: Claudia Ituarte-Lima and Alejandra Acosta Jiménez
The Transnational Legal Clinic Defending a Living Earth under Defend-Bio project together with partners working on human rights and environmental justice prepared a joint submission to inform the report by the UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights Defenders on Human Rights Defenders working on climate change and a just transition to be presented to the 80th session of the UN General Assembly in October 2025.
Authors of this submission were: Dr. Claudia Ituarte-Lima, Dr. Ana María Vargas Falla, Alejandra Acosta Jiménez, Valentina Lomanto-Perdomo, Meline Avagyan, Windi Arini, Charlie Meidino Albajili, Heléna Von Glahn, Paola Cortés, Laura Serna Mosquera, Constanza Mottin, and Isabell Pope.
Read the full submission here.
As the world shifts toward renewable energy and sustainable development, environmental human rights defenders (EHRDs) / biosphere defenders play a crucial role in ensuring just transitions. The submission highlights key challenges, lessons learned, and recommendations for protecting those at the forefront of environmental justice.
The main recommendations to the UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights Defenders and the global policy community are to:
1) Strengthen the transnational dimensions of environmental information—an essential component of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment—and ensure its linkage with the rights to freedom of opinion and expression and to peaceful assembly and association, as these are fundamental to an enabling environment for defenders
2) Recognize and support the creative and diverse strategies human rights defenders use to expose the far-reaching impacts of fossil fuel dependence, including violations of economic, social, and cultural rights
3) Adopt a preventive, rights-based approach to green transitions that empowers defenders as agents of change and addresses structural inequalities and intersecting sustainability challenges.
Environmental defenders are not obstacles to development—they are essential agents of change to transition to a just and thriving future for humans and other living beings. Respecting, protecting and fulfilling their rights must be central to global development, climate and energy policies.