Hector Miguel Xelo Garcia

I research how environmental harm becomes a human rights violation: toxic waste, climate change, biodiversity loss.

I began by reading other people’s case files. During a master’s placement I worked remotely with Defendiendo el Derecho a un Medio Ambiente Sano, an association that has spent years litigating in Quintana Roo against tourism and industrial developments. Two things became clear there. First, that the pattern repeats from one country to the next: nature is sacrificed for economic projects that end up hitting the communities that were already worst off. Second, that winning case by case is not enough. When a judgment will not do it, the rule itself has to change.

That is why I drafted the Ley Solimán, one of four proposals in the ONCExCUATRO citizens’ package filed with the Quintana Roo state congress in 2025. It makes it an offence to sell housing or plots before the servicing works are complete, extends criminal liability to the officials who authorise such sales or fail to enforce performance bonds, and requires the State to make good the harm caused by its own failure to act. It is still working its way through. That is where I understood where my ground is: in the rule, not in the procedure.

I learned law through principles rather than provisions. What an environmental impact assessment requires changes from one country to the next, sometimes from one community to the next; the principles beneath it (prevention, precaution, polluter pays, non-regression) do not. If nature is universal, the law that protects it can be too. That is what makes this work portable across legal systems, and moving between France, Mexico and the UN system is exactly what I do.

Lawyer, researcher, and advocate for nature and human rights.

Almost every constitution in the world says something about the environment. Almost none says it the same way, and almost none works the same way. My doctoral thesis, supervised by Professor Mathieu Disant at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, asks a simple question that has no clear answer: does putting environmental protection in a constitution actually achieve anything? And if it does, what does a constitutional provision need in order to work?

Comparative law today compares apples to oranges. Countries that “have” a right to a healthy environment get counted without anyone examining how the provision is drafted or what legal order it sits in. Wording varies enormously from one constitution to another and carries very different consequences in practice; ignoring that thins the analysis out, when it does not invalidate it outright.

What I do is analyse constitutional environmental provisions one at a time: how they are written, how courts have applied them, and whether they have produced tangible improvements. To do that I built a classification protocol with explicit rules, so that two researchers working on the same text reach the same result. That is rare in law and should not be: an analysis nobody can reproduce is an opinion.

Once all 193 constitutions are coded, something will exist that does not exist today: families or models of environmental protection grouping states with comparable standards, and an account of why some constitutional provisions work and others do not.

The limits, stated plainly: this research improves nothing on its own, which depends on legislators, institutions and political will; and it stops at the constitution, without extending to each country’s statutory and regulatory framework.

A Spanish-language podcast about justice and nature, made for anyone who wants to understand them, not only for lawyers. Twenty episodes across four series: landmark cases in international environmental law; ecocide, disasters and environmental accidents; human rights and the environment; and environmental news.

It is where I can do what an article does not allow: tell a case as a story, say what I think, and speak to people who will never open a law review. It is open to guests.

Listen on Spotify

Write to me to invite me to give a lecture or seminar, propose an academic or research collaboration, join the podcast, or simply respond to something here. I give online lectures and seminars at no cost to the institution.

I work in Spanish, French and English; write in whichever you prefer.

• ORCID
• HAL
• LinkedIn
• Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
• Spotify