In July 2022, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution recognizing the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. Its proponents hope that the resolution will catalyze further action, but many of the states voting for it expressed the view that it has no legal effect in itself. Will UN recognition of this right nevertheless change international law? If so, how? This symposium brings together the perspectives of six distinguished scholars on this question. Philip Alston and Carmen Gonzalez examine how recognition may change our understanding of human rights law; Hélène Tigroudja and Maria Antonia Tigre analyze its impact on the burgeoning environmental jurisprudence of the UN human rights treaty bodies and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights; Rosemary Mwanza explores how the right may affect parallel efforts to codify the crime of ecocide; and Louis Kotzé concludes by arguing that the right still falls short of the transformational shift necessary to recognize and protect the rights of nature and of future generations. Before describing their contributions in more detail, this introduction reviews the background of the resolution and describes its main provisions.

The lengthy process culminating in the UN General Assembly's recognition of the right to a healthy environment provides important insights into the nature of today's international human rights regime. In particular, it shows that human rights have moved well beyond the impoverished conceptions of rights that dominated the second part of the last century, that new norms develop in ways that are more complex and flexible than traditional doctrinal accounts would suggest, and that today's process of norm generation involves a wide and diverse array of actors, with states sometimes struggling to keep up.

This essay explores the implications of the right to a healthy environment for the long-standing criticisms of international human rights law as a project and product of the Global North. It examines the Southern origins of the right to a healthy environment and its interpretations in regional human rights tribunals. The essay analyzes the responses offered by this evolving jurisprudence to various objections to human rights-based approaches to environmental protection. These include the human rights-based framework's individualism, anthropocentrism, failure to address transboundary harm, and failure to challenge the economic law instruments that perpetuate environmental degradation.

Since the end of the 2010s, some of the UN human rights treaty bodies have affirmed and enhanced states’ obligations in relation to the environment. This “green turn,” deeply influenced by the jurisprudence of the regional human rights tribunals and the work of UN Special Procedures, raises the question of the potential recognition of an autonomous right to a healthy environment—that is, a free-standing right that is not primarily derived from existing human rights. The claim of this essay is that in the absence of a clear mandate from states to the treaty bodies to monitor the implementation of the right, its symbolic affirmation will have only limited impact. Inspired by the discussions at the Council of Europe on the adoption of a new Protocol to the European Convention of Human Rights, states at the UN level should go further and work toward a binding protocol. However, this raises the difficult issue of connecting the right to civil and political rights, to economic, social, and cultural rights, or to a specific instrument such as the Convention on the Rights of the Child. Ultimately, this essay reflects the shortcomings of the binary approach separating human rights into hermetic categories.

Although there is still no United Nations treaty on the right to a healthy environment, the recognition of the right by the UN General Assembly and the UN Human Rights Council have helped solidify its status as customary international law. The overwhelming recognition of the right at the national and regional levels, and now at the United Nations, evidences greater uniformity and certainty in understanding human rights obligations relating to the environment. But what value do the resolutions add to the regional recognition of the right in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)? Through judicial and legislative developments, LAC has provided fertile ground for the flourishing of the right to a healthy environment. The region has seen some of the most innovative responses to the fragmented fields of human rights and the environment, providing a model for progressive legal development. Within this context, this essay focuses on how UN recognition of the new right may impact the burgeoning law on human rights and the environment in LAC. I argue that the resolutions should support the already rich environmental and climate jurisprudence in the region to realize the full potential of the right to a healthy environment. The right to a healthy environment can further solidify the role of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACtHR) as a leading human rights court in environmental protection, with wide-ranging implications for rights-based environmental (and climate) litigation.

This essay explores some of the reasons why the recognition by the UN General Assembly of the human right to a healthy environment could catalyze the codification of ecocide as a crime under international law. It argues that even though the two concepts fall within distinct areas of international law, their potential for a synergistic interaction derives from the right's rhetorical and normative aspects. The right's rhetorical dimension refers to the communicative value derived from phrasing calls for responsive action in the language of rights, while the right's normative dimension alludes to its legal or juridical character.

In this essay I reflect upon whether and how the recent international recognition of the right to a healthy environment might––or might not––provide greater support for efforts to define and protect the rights of what one could term “law's hidden subjects,” namely future generations and nature. Although there are several examples of rights-based regimes that aim to protect future generations and nature, few would disagree that these hidden subjects require better legal protection, and that thoroughgoing reform of existing human rights law is overdue. I argue that the international recognition of a human right to a healthy environment might contribute less to such reforms than what one would have intuitively expected. One reason for this is because the formulation of the right does not provide anything new in terms of more comprehensive recognition and protection of rights of nature and future generations. Although it is an important symbolic event that signifies broad consensus on the importance of rights-based environmental protection, many domestic and regional legal regimes already protect future generations, while some even offer innovative rights of nature provisions. At best, UN General Assembly Resolution 76/300 merely reinforces the status quo ante.