The chapter presents an overview of the case law of other international and regional human rights protection regimes examined for this book. The number of cases is generally limited and the doctrinal position on environmental human rights is therefore less clear and developed when compared to the ECHR. Therefore, it is difficult to conclude with much certainty whether the environmental minimum is compatible with the prevailing doctrinal position under the UN Covenants, the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights and the American Convention on Human Rights. Some aspects of the doctrinal approaches are generally supportive of core normative claims and principles of the environmental minimum, while others appear to challenge the framework at least by implication. Nonetheless, if the environmental minimum were consistently applied to approach environmental harm in these systems, it would bring about significant improvements towards a more coherent and principled case law aligned with the normative claims of environmental human rights.

The chapter tries to establish a systematic framework which allows us to structure the examination of human rights cases by indicating the necessary legal components and putting these elements in their proper place and in context to each other. Substantive human rights guarantees as, e.g., enshrined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights or the European Convention, cannot be fully understood without taking account of their explicit or implicit limitations; only together do they form the basis for their successful invocation. Therefore the legal limits of and restrictions to human rights as well as the limitations drawn to the use of restrictions, as particularly the principle of proportionality, are discussed. Primacy of freedom, (strict) interpretation, balancing of rights, absolute rights, margin of appreciation and derogation from human rights are other issues that have to be dealt with in the given context.

The logic of democratic power is put to an empirical test in Chapter 6. Having identified treaties as the best observable source of international rules, this chapter tests the democratic power argument for international rule–based cooperation systematically in the context of international treaty making, which involves three stages – negotiations, commitment, and compliance. This statistical analysis is based on a dataset of seventy–five international treaties adopted between 1945 and 2008 and is complemented with insights from the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. The results reveal consistent and robust empirical patterns regarding states’ willingness and ability to cooperate over international treaties, which are generalizable across treaties, issues, and the stages of treaty making. The analysis confirms the centrality of the democratic powers as the chief promoters and adherents of international rules that gradually but inadvertently contribute to the constitutionalization of world politics.

Because of its transboundary effects and because states will be the primary actors, large-scale solar geoengineering and its governance are matters of international law. This is the third of four chapters that consider international legal rules, here regarding human rights. The chapter introduces international human rights law and how it relates to the environment and climate change. It reviews and critiques the limited literature on human rights and solar geoengineering. The remainder considers the issues in four ways. First, solar geoengineering is presently being explored as scientific research, for which international human rights law has provisions for the researcher and the potential beneficiaries of resulting knowledge. Second, outdoor research may affect people as research subjects, for whom international human rights law provides some protections. Third, procedural human rights to information, participation in public affairs, and legal remedies are widely recognized. Finally, the international law of substantive human rights such as those to health, to an adequate standard of living, to be free from hunger, and to life could inform solar geoengineering governance.