Climate Change, Fundamental Rights, and Statutory Interpretation

The climate change crisis demands a wholesale transformation of law. In this article, we consider one potential component of that transformation: the role that rights-protective statutory interpretation might play. Specifically, we analyse the transformative potential of the principle of legality. The principle of legality is a presumption of statutory interpretation that legislation should not be read as infringing fundamental common law rights in the absence of irresistibly clear statutory language. It enables courts to give statutory words their least rights-infringing meaning. The law in international fora and domestic jurisdictions now acknowledges that climate change will adversely affect human rights. We make the linkage between climate change, fundamental rights, and statutory interpretation and argue that the principle of legality may, in appropriate cases, be used to interpret legislation regulating the range of human activity, in a climate-protective way.