To acknowledge the direct functional relationship between protection of the environment and the protection and promotion of human rights is to accept a truism. However, the relationship is a complex one and, ever since first formally recognised at the international level in the 1972 Stockholm Declaration, has been liable to being misunderstood. Evidence of this can be seen in the idea that the individual or collective interest in environmental protection is subsumable under a substantive ‘environmental human right’, and that a human right to a clean environment either exists as a matter of current general international law or ought to be recognised as such. While many commentators would agree that such a right does not exist today, support for formally recognising or establishing one cuts across a wide spectrum of international public opinion. Significantly, it appears to have been gaining renewed momentum recently.