The Doctrine — The Human Right to the Future

International law has, generation after generation, gone on recognizing civil, social, cultural, and environmental rights. Yet it still has not taken the decisive step: expressly recognizing future generations as holders of their own rights, backed by concrete guarantees. That is the legal gap this doctrine sets out to close.

The proposal is simple to state, yet far-reaching in its ethical and legal consequences:

Since the mid-twentieth century, dozens of international conventions have referred to the importance of protecting future generations — almost always as a statement of intent in their preambles, without concrete mechanisms to make it effective.

That historical inertia is beginning to shift: Malta’s Sustainable Development Act of 2012, which created the office of Guardian of Future Generations, and Wales’s Well-being of Future Generations Act of 2015, which created the Future Generations Commissioner, were pioneering steps. More recently, the European Union has, since December 2024, appointed a European Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness. Adding to this emerging momentum are the Declaration on Future Generations adopted by the UN at the Summit of the Future in September 2024, the advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice of July 2025 — which recognized State obligations to protect both present and future generations from climate change —, and the 2023 Maastricht Principles, in whose drafting I took part.