ABSTRACT
This chapter imagines what international human rights law would look like if a set of assumptions was made entailing ethical environmental obligations towards future generations. This is used as a springboard for exploring the obstacles and possibilities of current international human rights (IHR) with regard to how they treat long-term environmental duties to future people. The legal fiction of a ‘trust’ is a particularly useful mechanism in this respect. However, while IHR in addressing intergenerational aspects of the global environment can help to anchor moral thresholds below which no one should be allowed to fall, it cannot in itself address the distributional justice issues at stake.
