A Quest for an Eco-centric Approach to International Law: the COVID-19 Pandemic as Game Changer
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A Quest for an Eco-centric Approach to International Law: the COVID-19 Pandemic as Game Changer Sara De Vido 1,2 Accepted: 29 October 2020/ # The Author(s) 2020
Abstract
This Reflection starts from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic as unprecedented occasio to reflect on the approach to international law, which—it is contended—is anthropocentric, and its inadequacy to respond to current challenges. In the first part, the Reflection argues that there is, more than ever, an undeferrable need for a change of approach to international law toward ecocentrism, which puts the environment at the center and conceives the environment as us, including humans, non-human beings, and natural objects. To encourage the incorporation of ecocentrism in the entire discipline, the Reflection will rely on some insight of ecofeminism, whose potential has not been fully investigated in international legal scholarship. In the second part, the Reflection illustrates what an eco-centric international law would mean, imagining three possible applications: first, what the author has called environmental global health, which is connected to the current pandemic and puts into question the proposals dealing with global health that completely miss the theorization of the environment as a whole; second, how actors of international law would change according to an eco-centric perspective; and, third, how the rules prohibiting the use of force might be reconceptualized. The analysis contained in these pages cannot itself exhaust all the possible nuances of the legal reasoning, but it is aimed at being a provocative starting point for a change in the mindset and approach of international legal scholarship. Keywords Anthropocentrism . Ecocentrism . Animal rights . Rights of the nature . Environment . Global health . COVID-19 . Paradigm change . Ecofeminism
* Sara De Vido [email protected]
1
Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy
2
Manchester International Law Centre, Manchester, UK
Jus Cogens
1 Introduction: Challenging the Anthropocentric Structure of International Law Back in 1826, Mary Shelley imagined a virus that would have annihilated the world in the last decade of the twenty-first century in The Last Man, the least known of her works. It was a novel, but one with a high power of evocation. In 1994, the American science author Laurie Garrett wrote The Coming Plague, in which she scientifically talked about deforestation and disruption of natural balances, viruses whose existence becomes notorious with the outbreak of epidemics, and social disparities in the access to health services. What can international lawyers learn from these Cassandran books? The pandemic that spread around the world in 2020 has affected human rights and raised human security issues. It represents, above all, a major environmental issue. International law, as all fields of law, is facing enormous challenges. How relevant is international environmental law in the debate? Are states, along with international organizations, capable of providing appropriate a
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