European Legal Studies Center Lunchtime Talks

Guest speaker Alicja Sikora-Kalėda (Jagiellonian University, Kraków) will present a talk "Contemplating the limits of human rights as instruments of pressure for the planetary cause. Recent developments in EU law and beyond"

Contemplating the limits of human rights as instruments of pressure for the planetary cause. Recent developments in EU law and beyond

A lunchtime talk by

Alicja Sikora-Kalėda

Tuesday, April 1, 2025
12:10 pm to 1:10 pm
WJW 417

Lunch will be served - Please RSVP
 

Human rights have been in recent years operationalised through the judicial debate and gradually became an instrument of pressure on State actors echoing a need of a change of the legal and economic framework in many jurisdictions around the globe. Strategic litigation embodied in the climate change rationale is a new form of legal practice. However, it seems that existing normative and judicial expressions of greening human rights by deriving environmental rights from expressly recognised human rights are about to reach their limits, in particular after the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) judgement in case Klimaseniorinnen. Thus, contemplating their philosophical foundations and possible legal avenues of construing new generation of environmental rights adapted to the climate change reality, societal and technological challenges is worthwhile. In the field of European Union law, no substantive right to a healthy environment is recognized, but various instruments, including new Aarhus Regulation enabling NGOs to review the legality of EU administrative measures related to the environment are available. The key actor of a pro-ecological interpretation of EU law remains the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) which environmental case-law has reached its apex in recent years leading to a doctrinal claim of a positivist approach to rights of nature in EU law.

Alicja Sikora-Kalėda, Dr hab. (Jagiellonian University, Kraków), Senior Emile Noël Fellow 2024-2025 (New York University School of Law) is an EU law academic and practitioner whose research interests focus on EU constitutional law with particular emphasis on environmental law and climate change. She has previously held positions of a Legal Secretary (référendaire) at the Court of Justice of the European Union (2004 – 2017) and of a Legal Advisor to the Council of the European Union and the European Council (2017 – 2024) where she has been involved in high-profile litigation before the EU Courts.

Alicja Sikora-Kalėda is an Associated Researcher at Centre d’étude du droit de l’environnement (CEDRE) of the UCLouvain Saint-Louis University (Brussels). She has been Senior Lecturer at the Law Faculty of the Jagiellonian University since 2013 where she currently acts as an academic coordinator of the Jean Monnet Module “Sustainability and Climate Change in EU Law”. She is a Member of the Polish Bar (Kraków). Her monograph “Constitutionalisation of environmental protection in EU law” (Europa Law Publishing 2020) received wide acclaim and was awarded a First prize in the LVIII Polish Academy of Sciences National Contest for the best habilitation monograph in 2023.

In October 2024, she was designated by the Polish government as the ad hoc Polish judge of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR).