The Human Right to a Healthy Environment

The absence of a globally recognized right to a healthy environment has not prevented the development of human rights norms relating to the environment. Indeed, one of the most noteworthy aspects of human rights law over the last twenty years is that UN treaty bodies, regional tribunals, special rapporteurs, and other human rights mechanisms have applied human rights law to environmental issues even without a stand-alone, justiciable human right to a healthy environment. In The Human Right to a Healthy Environment, a diverse set of scholars and practitioners, all of whom have been instrumental in defining the relationship between human rights and the environment, provide their thoughts on what is, or should be, the role of an international human right to a healthy environment. The right to a healthy environment could be a capstone to this field of law, could help to provide structure to it, or could move it in new directions.

Author Biography

John H. Knox is Henry C. Lauerman Professor of International Law at Wake Forest University, North Carolina, he has written extensively on human rights and environmental issues. The first UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, he has led the effort to understand and promote the application of human rights to environmental issues. He won the Francis Deák Prize for scholarship in 2003. Between 1999 and 2005, he chaired a national advisory committee to the US Environmental Protection Agency, and from 2008 to 2012 he was of counsel to the Center for International Environmental Law. Ramin Pejan is a staff attorney at Earthjustice’s International Program, based in San Francisco. He is also an adjunct clinical professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, in its International Justice Clinic. Prior to Earthjustice, Ramin worked for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the United Nations Environment Programme on the links between human rights and environmental issues. From 2010 to 2012, Ramin worked in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, as legal counsel for the Association for Water and Rural Development, a non-profit organization focusing on water resource management issues in rural South Africa.