The future generation – who are they?

Dear first-year students, in your eyes I may already seem rather old, but: all of us belong to the “future generation”.

Laws on sustainability frequently refer to future generations. We must prevent climate change for present and future generations. Future generations means: people who have not yet been born. This creates a legal problem, because you can only go to court once you already exist. In philosophy, this is called the non-identity problem: we do not yet know who future generations are or what they think, which makes it difficult to represent them today. In climate litigation, you can see judges struggling with this issue: future generations are often mentioned, but their rights are rarely invoked as such.

At the same time, many legal documents that refer to future generations date back to the 1970s and 1980s. Back then, I had not even been born yet! So were all of us today once considered those “future generations”?

Maya communities
Yes indeed, the Human Rights Committee confirmed this last year in a case against Guatemala, which had displaced Indigenous Maya communities from their traditional lands during armed conflicts in the 1980s. This was not only a human rights violation against the people who were physically displaced at the time, but also against their children and grandchildren, who would grow up elsewhere - and who, during the displacement itself, still belonged to a “future generation”.

In short, with hindsight, we can now invoke in court the rights we once held as the future generations of the past. This will undoubtedly happen more often in legal cases: we were the future. And we still are.

Laura Burgers is an assistant professor of law who researches climate litigation, the rights of nature, and the rights of future generations. This column was published in our magazine.