2016 Best Graduate Student Paper

While environmental protection and human rights are traditionally conceptualized in a synergistic fashion, the paper unveils through a series of cases how these two legitimate goals can enter into collision and, most importantly, which adjudicative topoi the CJEU employs to address these normative conflicts. The paper demonstrates how Luxembourg’s judges have developed specific hermeneutics that stand far from formal techniques of interpretation. In exploring the CJEU’s solipsistic character, its subtle process of semantic law-making embedded in its recourse to the ever-expanding ‘general interest’ to environmental protection, and its reliance on a managerial vernacular of expertise, the analysis not only elucidates changing patterns of fundamental rights adjudication but also comments on the increasingly complex legal encounter between human rights and environmental protection.


Marie-Catherine Petersmann presentation at 2016 Oslo Colloquium

Marie-Catherine Petersmann

Marie-Catherine Petersmann is a third year PhD researcher in International Law at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, Italy. Her research focuses on the conflicting relationship between environmental protection and human rights. More specifically, she investigates how international human rights adjudicators manage specific conflicts of norms – when environmental protection legislations negatively impact human rights – and how they reconcile these two legitimate yet sometimes colliding legal obligations. Before beginning her academic career, Marie worked for the UNHCR and for the FIDH in Geneva. Marie’s LinkedIn profile can be found here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/marie-catherine-petersmann-bb9517128/