Volume 21: Issue | Numéro 2 (2025)
Pierre Jourdain
On October 27, 2023, the French Constitutional Council rendered a decision in the Association Meuse nature environnement et al. case. In this decision, the Council used the notion of non-compromise of the interest of future generations as a constitutional norm. This decision follows a recent trend in the Constitutional Council case law which gives to this rather unused aspect of French constitutional law an unprecedented justiciability. This article aims to explain the constitutional status of the principle of non-compromise of the interests of future generations in France to non-specialists of French law and discuss the potential implications of this decision. It focuses mainly on the question of the legal personality of future generations and the criteria used by the Constitutional Council to protect them. These implications are also compared to the relevant practice of France’s neighbours such as Italy, Germany, and Belgium to identify the original (and non-original) aspects of French practice.
Sirja-Leena Penttinen and Emily Burlinghaus
In recent years, international supply chains have come under stress at both the national and international levels. One such supply chain is batteries, a key technology to drive the low-carbon energy transition. In this paper, we use a systemic perspective to examine how to enhance resilience of the battery supply chain by analysing recent measures introduced as a response to the security concerns of the battery supply chain by the first and third largest economies in the world—the United States (US) and the European Union (EU). We focus on the measures introduced by the US and the EU in the period up to and including 2024 because these two jurisdictions dominate the increasing share of global lithium-ion battery cell demand with China and have introduced measures specifically to reduce dependency on the latter—the dominant actor in the battery supply chain. We seek to examine the measures introduced to enhance battery supply chain resilience in both the US and the EU against the framework of resilience—specifically, the three capacities of resilience: absorption, adaption, and transformation. We use these capacities of resilience as a framework for analysing different jurisdictional priorities around strengthening battery supply chains in the US and EU.
Carla Arbelaez
International efforts to mitigate, and adapt to, the effects of climate change are often done in the name of present and future generations of children; the people who will likely witness the escalation of its destructive forces. Over the past twenty years, academic literature has given increasing attention to climate migrants and child migrants as subgroups that deserve particularized analysis and tailored recommendations within law and policy. Despite this, there is little academic analysis of the unique experiences, needs and rights of child climate migrants. This paper aims to address this gap by assessing whether the 2018 Global Compact for Safe, Orderly, and Regular Migration (GCM) sufficiently upholds the rights of this migrant subgroup as guaranteed under the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Drawing inspiration from Jane McAdam’s words, “if a line is to be drawn, a child is foremost a child before [they are] a refugee”, this paper concludes that CRC protections are the minimum standards owed to child climate migrants merely for being children, and that state commitments within the GCM can supplement these foundational protections to achieve an optimal international law framework of protection measures for this migrant subgroup.