Webinar 3: Nuclear weapons and human rights: developments in science and international law since the 1996 ICJ Advisory Opinion
The 1996 ICJ AO briefly addressed the human rights constraints on the threat or use of nuclear weapons, through the sole prism of the right to life, and concluded that whether a particular loss of life in war is an arbitrary deprivation of life can only be decided by reference to IHL. Thirty years later, how has international law evolved? What does new science say about the impacts of nuclear weapons on human health, including on the descendants of first-generation survivors? What are the new developments in international human rights law of relevance to the legality of nuclear weapons? How do inter-generational rights and the rights of indigenous peoples further constrain nuclear weapons? And to what extent do human rights continue to apply in war?
PANEL
- What we know today about the public health impacts of nuclear war – Dr Andrew Haines, Professor of Environmental Change and Public Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine
- Nuclear weapons under the lens of international human rights law – Simon Walker, Chief, Rule of Law and Democracy Section, Office the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights
- From the ICJ to lived experience: a survivor-centred approach, intergenerational harm, and the role of economic, social, cultural, and disability rights in the pursuit of nuclear justice – Aigerim Seitenova, Co-founder, Qazaq Nuclear Frontline Coalition
- The rights of future generations and nuclear weapons – Ashfaq Khalfan, Director of the Sustainability Regulation Observatory, London School of Economics and Political Science
