UN: THE HUMAN RIGHT TO A HEALTHY ENVIRONMENT?
It sounds obvious right? Having a healthy environment is fundamental to an individual’s wellbeing, yet this is something that’s missing from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The closest article that can be found is the following:
“Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services…”
There’s a lot we can dig into there, like the failure of the UK to deal with the rise in homelessness – what a developed fucking country we live in, but there’s no mention of the environment.
Why are human rights and environmental protection thought of as separate problems? More than 100 countries have laws that basically recognize the connection, but the UN itself and dozens more don’t formally recognize environmental rights. Who are the victims here? Those fighting to protect the environment.
The brave fuckers who fight against deforestation, pollution, land grabs, poaching, and more, who are arrested, beaten, intimidated and even murdered for being environmental activists. 197 land and environmental defenders were murdered last year according to monitoring group Global Witness. A shocking number of these murders aren’t brought to trial and killers remain unpunished.
UN Environment recently launched an environmental rights initiative to increase the training of judges, prosecutors and police in environmental law but John Knox, the UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment wants to take it a step further and make it a UN resolution.
Two of Knox’s suggested additions are as follows:
“States should ensure a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment in order to respect, protect and fulfil human rights.
States should respect, protect and fulfil human rights in or
der to ensure a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment.”
These would without a doubt tie together human rights and environmental issues. It’s a step in the right direction. It would mean rather than criminalizing those who fight for the environment, the pressure is on governments to support them instead.
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