Climate Change as a Reason for Asylum. A just Claim?

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2020 in the subject Politics - Other International Politics Topics, grade: 1,5, University of Rostock, language: English, abstract: The verdict of the UN Human Rights Committee poses the issue of a potential entitlement to asylum for humans experiencing climate-induced displacement. Thus this thesis is gonna examine this rather new topic of the political science: the future forced migration in the context of climate change and its consequences for the receiving countries and their legal systems. Consequently, for one thing in this thesis it will be tried to point out the causal correlation of climate change and migration and, moreover, on this basis tried to undertake reflections regarding a potential need for reformation of national and international refugee and asylum law in order to protect the affected people. Since justice is highly important for social cooperation and also currently being tested by not only the global resource scarcity and its resulting conflicts, but also, as shall be shown with this thesis, by the that very human-induced climate change, the focus of this work shall not be put on the potential implementation of climate refugees into the law of nations, but rather on the more philosophical question of justification regarding a potential asylum for the (prospective) victims of climate change.

The leading question of this examination is thus gonna be, if the claim to asylum due to the persecution through human-induced climate change is a just claim ¿ or just a claim. Because the abstract term of justice and its concepts, which vary depending on the author, could fill a thesis on its own, this work will use the specific theory of justice of political philosopher John Rawls and thus will, in pursuit of the main goal to concretely judge the obligation of states towards climate refugees on basis of an abstract justice term, outline his theory of ¿justice as fairness¿.