ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to identify various central aspects that future debates about the role of the human rights in responding to contemporary ecological challenges should take into consideration. Necessary measures for effective sustainable politics will have an impact on the legitimate exercise of liberties, and therefore it is not possible to avoid discussing how the rights of currently living people relate to the obligations we have with regard to future people on the basis of human rights principles. We highlight three points that deserve particular discussion: the role of future people within the human rights regime; how they are represented in our political and legal order; and what this implies in terms of international coordination and the forming of supra-national institutions. This short overview shows that seeing human rights in a long-term perspective urges us to debate them from a broader range of interdisciplinary perspectives; it also shows that questions of sustainability must be on the research agenda of the social sciences and humanities in the years to come.
