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11 - The Politics of Human Rights, the Environment, and Climate Change at the Human Rights Council

Toward a Universal Right to a Healthy Environment?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 June 2018

John H. Knox
Affiliation:
Wake Forest University, North Carolina
Ramin Pejan
Affiliation:
Earthjustice
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Summary

International efforts to draw attention to, understand, clarify, and leverage the relationship between human rights and the environment have made remarkable progress since the establishment of the UN Human Rights Council in 2006. This effort was initially spearheaded by a Small Island Developing State, the Maldives, which from 2008 onwards tabled a series of resolutions on human rights and climate change and then, from 2011 onwards, on human rights and the environment. It was the unspoken hope of the Maldives that the norm-setting exercise initiated by these texts, already important in of itself, might also represent a first step towards open and informed intergovernmental reflections on the relative merits of declaring a new universal right to a clean and healthy environment. By late 2017, the work of the Maldives and allied States, as well as the UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and environment and supportive NGOs, had moved the international community to within touching distance of what would be the capstone of their decades-long endeavor: to elaborate, negotiate, and declare a new universal right to a safe, clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2018

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