Presentation short abstract

Over the past two decades, environmental litigation has been increasingly used by youth from marginalised groups like the Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities. This research dives into the action repertoire of these actors to achieve a decolonial environmental justice.

Presentation long abstract

Environmental litigation is increasingly being used by young plaintiffs to compel governments to stronger climate mitigation measures and to uphold human rights obligations (Parker et al., 2022). Youth environmental activism is not a new phenomenon, however their increasing use of litigation is unprecedented (Kotzé and Knappe, 2023).

Young people share a transnational generational commonality, marked by limited political power, structural marginalization, and significant exposure to climate consequences, compared to previous age groups. They also experience unequal vulnerabilities shaped by socio-economic conditions, colonial legacies, and intersecting factors (Arrouche and Hammou, 2024), reinforced by global injustices embedded within a neocolonial international system.

Existing scholarship leaves a gap regarding Global South litigation (Murcott and Tigre, 2024) and on how youth use legal avenues as a form of political action. Moreover, most analyses focus on intergenerational justice while overlooking intra-generational inequalities (Slobodian, 2020; André and Gosseries, 2024).

This research seeks to address these gaps by examining the roles and practices of marginalised youth, through a comparative approach of three landmark cases (ICJ Request for an Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change (July 2025), Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Petition of Children of Cité Soleil and SAKALA (February 2021), Committee on the Rights of the Child, Sacchi et al. v. Argentina et al (October 2021). Drawing on a documents analysis and decolonial approaches (Ferdinand, 2019 ; Mignolo, 2018; Tuhiwai Smith, 2021), it explores how young actors develop supranational strategies and articulate claims for decolonial and anti-racist environmental justice.