S3 Episode 1: From responsibility to reparations of the climate crisis: why the biggest polluters must pay up for climate damages?

Future Perfect | Futur Antérieur

In the first episode of the third season of the Future Perfect-Futur Antérieur podcast, Professor Joshua Castellino, the Co-Executive Director of Minority Rights Group International and Professor of International & Comparative Law at University of Derby, UK, discusses how marginalized racial groups, particularly in Africa, bear the heaviest burden of the global ecological crisis. This episode examines the colonial roots of the climate crisis, emphasizing that European colonialism established extractive systems that treat nature as a commodity, driving both wealth inequality and environmental destruction. He critiques current environmental policies, particularly those that prioritize corporate profit at the expense of vulnerable communities and ecosystems. He stresses that indigenous peoples should not bear the primary responsibility for solving a crisis they did not create. Instead, responsibility should fall on major polluters like corporations and industrialized nations. He also warns against "green colonialism," where conservation efforts further displace indigenous communities under the guise of environmental protection.

Joshua Castellino is Co-Executive Director of Minority Rights Group International and Professor of International & Comparative Law at University of Derby, UK. He founded the School of Law at Middlesex and served as its Dean until 2018, stepping down to take on the role at Minority Rights Group full-time while retaining his Chair until 2022. Joshua holds Visiting Professorships at the College of Europe, (Poland), Oxford University (UK), & the Irish Centre for Human Rights, (Republic of Ireland) and serves pro bono on governing boards of civil society organizations in Germany, Netherlands, UK, Sweden, Uganda and Hungary. He is the current Chair of the Board of Trustees of Privacy International UK and Door Tenant at 25 Bedford Row.

Born and raised in Mumbai, India, Joshua worked as a journalist for Indian Express Newspapers Group in the 1990s, before winning a Chevening Scholarship and completing his PhD in International Law in 1998. He has published ten books (one forthcoming in 2025) and over a hundred articles on international law & human rights over twenty-five years in academia, including the Minority Rights Series (Oxford University Press). His latest book is titled Calibrating Colonial Crime: Reparations & the Crime of Unjust Enrichment.

Joshua participated in the European Union China Diplomatic & Expert Dialogue on Human Rights (2002-2006) and was appointed Chair, by the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights of the 8th Forum on Minority Issues (2015), an inter-governmental dialogue with civil society under the auspices of the United Nations Human Rights Council.

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