Human rights

Sixteen young Montanans who sued their state over climate change emerged victorious on Aug. 14, 2023, from a first-of-its-kind climate trial. The case, Held v. State of Montana, was based on allegations that state energy policies violate the young plaintiffs’ constitutional right to “a clean and healthful environment” – a right that has been enshrined in the Montana Constitution since the 1970s. The plaintiffs claimed that state laws promoting fossil fuel extraction and forbidding the consideration of climate impacts during environmental review violate their constitutional environmental right. Judge Kathy Seeley’s ruling in the youths’ favor sets a powerful precedent for the role of “green amendments” in climate litigation. The lawsuit, heard in Montana district court, was the first in the U.S. to rely on a state’s constitutional right to a clean and healthful environment to challenge state policies that fuel climate change...

Salman Rushdie, the celebrated Anglo-Indian writer, once declared that the “most precious book” he possessed was his passport. Rushdie had already published dozens of works, including novels, short stories, essays and travelogues, to wide acclaim and considerable controversy. But he acknowledged that it was his British passport, doing “its stuff efficiently and unobtrusively,” that enabled him to pursue a literary career on the world stage. On the other hand, Rushdie viewed the Indian passport he had held as a boy in the 1950s as “a paltry thing.” “Instead of offering the bearer a general open-sesame to anywhere in the world,” he recalled, “it stated in grouchy bureaucratic language that it was only valid for travel to a specified – and distressingly short — list of countries.” Today, global mobility is on the rise. According to The Passport Index, an interactive ranking tool created by the investment f...