Nature has been treated in law as property, and exploited. But there is growing legal recognition that nature has rights, and affirming these is essential to both a healthy environment and human rights.
This article by Mari Margil appeared on Open Global Rights, November 14th, 2018.
The human right to a healthy environment is gaining ground, with more than 90 countries having enshrined it in law. For example, Article 14 of the Ecuador Constitution states, “The right of the population to live in a healthy and ecologically balanced environment that guarantees sustainability…is recognized.”
In India, the Supreme Court determined that the human right to a healthy environment is to be found within the scope of the constitutional protection of the right to life.
The increasing interest in the human right to a healthy environment comes as the world faces overlapping and related environmental crises – including the bleaching and die-off of coral reefs, increasing species extinction rates, and accelerating climate change.
Yet, as many are finding, the human right to a healthy environment is impossible to achieve if the environment itself is unhealthy. Indeed, Klaus Töpfer, former director of the United Nations Environment Program has stated that human rights in general “cannot be secured in a degraded or polluted environment.”
Töpfer explained, “The fundamental right to life is threatened by soil degradation and deforestation and by exposures to toxic chemicals, hazardous wastes and contaminated drinking water. Environmental conditions clearly help to determine the extent to which people enjoy their basic rights to life, health, adequate food and housing, and traditional livelihood and culture.”
Thus, we find that fulfilling the promise of human rights, and specifically the human right to a healthy environment, is dependent on the well-being of the environment itself. The human right to a healthy environment, therefore, cannot stand on its own. MORE…