promoting innovative ideas and practices.
The Center for Human Rights and Global Justice is a leading action-research hub that contributes to the global human rights project through scholarship, education, field building, advocacy, and legal practice. Across a wide range of issue areas and projects, we collaborate closely with partners from diverse geographies and disciplines on the new ideas, practices, and strategies that are needed to address existential challenges to human rights and global justice.
reimagining human rights for the twenty-first century.
We nurture ideas, actions, and connections that promote rights-based solutions to ecological emergencies, technological disruptions, deepening inequalities, threats to democracy and peace, and other urgent challenges to global governance and justice. We pursue initiatives that expand and catalyze the collective capacity of the human rights field. We deepen collaborations among communities of thought and practice from around the world, train future human rights thinkers and doers, and disseminate promising approaches to global justice research and advocacy.
staying current.

Climate Change on Trial
Landmark book and educational toolkit on rights-based climate law by César Rodríguez-Garavito
Can human rights help combat climate change? A global wave of climate litigation says yes, with a new book and initiative from the Climate Law Accelerator at NYU Law spotlighting the evolution and power of rights-based legal action.

Resources
More-Than-Human Rights: How can law evolve to protect the living planet?
Climate & Environment
In this lecture at the Leverhulme Centre for Nature Recovery, University of Oxford, César Rodríguez-Garavito explores emerging legal frameworks that recognize the rights of nature. Drawing from landmark cases, Indigenous traditions, and cross-disciplinary research, he examines how more-than-human rights are transforming biodiversity law, climate justice, and ecosystem governance worldwide.

Resources
What if We Understood What Animals Are Saying?: The Legal Impact of AI-Assisted Studies of Animal Communication
Climate & Environment

Resources
Introducing the MOTH Ideas Hub
Climate & Environment
Through the Ideas Hub, the MOTH Program publishes interdisciplinary short-form, research-grounded articles and multimedia featuring ideas that explore the legal, philosophical, scientific, and cultural paradigms reshaping how we think about nonhuman life and our interconnected world. We also invite submissions in different formats – for example, pictures, videos, animations, multimedia, and more.

Resources
NYU & UNEP Explore a Decade of the R2HE in Practice
Climate & Environment
A new report by the Earth Rights Research & Action, co-published with the United Nations Environment Programme, identifies and analyzes key trends in how courts around the world have interpreted and applied the right to a healthy environment over the past decade.

News
The Most Environmentally Imaginative Country on Earth Is Under Assault
Climate & Environment
César Rodríguez-Garavito and

Call for Applications
Interdisciplinary Perspectives for Earthly Flourishing 2026
Climate & Environment
The More-Than-Human Life (MOTH) Program will host the MOTH Festival of Ideas May 18-20, 2026. To join the 2026 academic conference component of the Festival, please submit your paper abstract and other information.
learn, connect, or contribute.
Explore our platform to find resources, stay informed about events, connect with like-minded individuals and organizations, and discover how you can play a role in shaping the future of human rights and global justice.