This chapter turns to the second ‘universalisation strategy’ developed by courts to conceal legal indeterminacy when environmental protection and human rights collide. It shows how courts rely on the authority and supposed objectivity of experts when interpreting conflicts and justifying their decisions. The argument unfolds in two parts. The first part analyses the role played by scientific experts in cases decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union. It critically assesses this expert-based managerial approach to conflict adjudication and highlights the risk of obstructing the protection of certain rights that do not fit a particular epistemic framework. The second part analyses the role played by specialised human rights experts in regional human rights courts in cases concerning Indigenous peoples and cultural minorities. A network of experts with particular institutional ties gets involved in such cases. These experts share a specific (legal) vocabulary and imaginary when speaking on behalf of the applicants, which courts replicate through cross-jurisdictional and cross-cultural referencing. This essentialises certain ways of living determined by artificial binaries of ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’. What emerges is an empirically rich understanding of regional human rights courts’ reliance on specialised expertise with both bright and dark sides.

When environmental protection and human rights collide, regional human rights courts balance the competing interests at stake to determine optimal outcomes. In doing so, courts tend to frame environmental protection as a ‘general interest’ capable of limiting relative fundamental rights and freedoms. This construction of an integrated, common and shared social value is loaded with political agency. In dictating specific outcomes as being in the ‘general’ interest, this adjudicative practice projects particular ideals into the realm of universality. This chapter traces the origins and meanings of the general interest, its attribution to environmental protection and, most importantly, its invocation by regional human rights courts when solving conflicts between environmental and human rights concerns. The ability of judges to reframe the particular in universal terms through the heuristic of the ‘general interest’ is assessed in the light of Martti Koskenniemi’s theory on the (discursive) hegemony of international legal argumentation. When courts frame particular substantive, aesthetic or procedural dimensions of environmental protection as being in the general interest, they produce a hegemonic vision of the environment–human rights interface, which is continuously reproduced through judicial cross-referencing. Thereby, values set under established case law gradually crystallise into patterns, precedents and social norms.