Interview with our guest researcher: Dr. Camilla S. Haake

Dr. Camilla S. Haake is a lawyer, post-doctoral researcher and habilitation candidate at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Fundamental and Human Rights (LBI-GMR) in Vienna and currently works as a visiting researcher at the Kassel Institute for Sustainability in the field of Just Transitions.

As part of the program line “Sustainability, Development, Economy, Social Affairs”, she mainly researches socially relevant human rights issues in the areas of economy and environment; from July 2025 she will head the program line.

As a researcher at the LBI-GMR, I am currently working on intersectional issues between human rights and business on the one hand and human rights and the environment on the other; my habilitation is on the “Rights of Nature”. It was through this topic that I became aware of the work of the “Just Transitions” department; it was also the reason for my research stay.

Through this shared expertise, I can contribute to discussions with researchers from the Just Transitions department - not least with regard to the importance of human rights in a globalized world - and in return benefit from an exchange of perspectives and the high scientific standards of Prof. Dr. Andreas Fischer-Lescano's team. 

I am very grateful for the opportunity to spend three months as a visiting researcher at the Just Transitions department of the KIS. Afterwards, I will take away a lot of new inspiration for the research work of my program line “Sustainability, Development, Economy, Social Affairs” at the LBI-GMR in Vienna. There, my colleagues and I deal with human rights-related research on sustainability-related topics that are characterized by very complex legal and factual contexts and high social relevance, similar to the sustainability-related research portfolio of the KIS. For example, we successfully completed a research project on “Audits and certifications in the context of human rights and environmental due diligence obligations of companies” at the beginning of 2025 (more information on the project at: gmr.lbg.ac.at/forschung/forschungsprojekt-inklusive-erstellung-einer-studie-zu-audits-und-zertifizierungen-im-kontext-menschenrechtlicher-und-umweltbezogener-sorgfaltspflichten-von-unternehmen/).

In addition, the research stay at the KIS offers me the opportunity to expand my knowledge on the topic of “Rights of Nature” and to review and further develop scientific concepts and theses in discussion with the other scientists.

The “rights of nature” fascinate me because of the variety of related topics that need to be addressed in the context of legal research - some of which are highly relevant from a dogmatic perspective. The pros and cons of subjective individual rights, the legal capacity and entitlement of non-human entities, forms of representation, the opportunities and risks of deriving “rights of nature” from existing human rights guarantees, questions of the ability to integrate ecocentric concerns into anthropocentric legal systems and the further development of law on the basis of social needs are just some of the problems that may be relevant in the context of this complex topic. Not least the great commitment of various civil society organizations for the recognition of nature as a legal entity and original “rights of nature”, also in (continental) European legal systems such as Germany or Austria, but also the resulting controversial discussions show the great need for research in this area. I am pleased to have the opportunity to contribute to a meaningful (legal) discourse in this area with my research.