Environmental Racism, the Cold War, and US Human Rights Exceptionalism

What is it about?

This book chapter examines the Cold War origins of the United States’ resistance to international human rights law and its implications for grassroots efforts to secure environmental justice through human rights law and institutions. The Cold War played a central role in the evolution of the United States’ relationship to international human rights law. Competing with the Soviet Union for the allegiance of the newly-independent states of Africa and Asia while maintaining racial segregation at home, the United States distanced itself from the evolving norms of international law that made state-sponsored racial discrimination illegal. The US blocked efforts by civil rights organizations to present human rights petitions to the United Nations, and branded as traitors and Kremlin apologists the civil rights activists who threatened the country’s prestige in the eyes of the Third World. As human rights law became an increasingly important arena of struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, the United States embarked on a policy of ratifying human rights treaties sparingly and including reservations, understandings, and declarations restricting domestic enforcement of these treaties. Using Mossville Environmental Action Now v. United States (currently pending before the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights) as a case study, the chapter evaluates the promise and the peril of using international human rights law to challenge environmental injustice. The DOI link will take you to the book. The book chapter is available at: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3294698

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Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

Photo by Etienne Girardet on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Grassroots environmental justice struggles all over the world have embraced the discourse of human rights and are also litigating in human rights tribunals. This chapter examines the opportunities and challenges presented by this approach in the United States. Specifically, the chapter examines the ways that the Cold War rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union shaped the US response to the human rights laws and institutions that threatened to undermine its international image by exposing systemic racism