Right to a Healthy Environment

“The right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is a human right that is important for the enjoyment of human rights.”

In 2022, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution declaring, “The right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is a human right that is essential for the enjoyment of human rights.” The resolution highlighted the way in which a healthy environment is critical to the enjoyment of numerous other human rights. The UN Human Rights Council has also called on all member states to take steps to “respect, protect, and fulfil” the right to a healthy environment.

Subsequently, both the International Court of Justice and the Inter-American Court of Human Rights have found, in landmark advisory opinions, that all people have the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.

Several regional human rights treaties also protect this right in various forms:

Article 24 of the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights provides that “all people shall have the right to a general satisfactory environment favourable to their development.” The African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights has held that this “imposes clear obligations upon a government that require states to take reasonable and other measures to prevent pollution and ecological degradation, to promote conservation, and to secure an ecologically sustainable development and use of natural resources.”
The 1988 Additional Protocol to the American Convention on Human Rights (the Protocol of San Salvador) states that “everyone shall have the right to live in a healthy environment.”
The ASEAN Declaration on the Right to a Safe, Clean, Healthy and Sustainable Environment states that the parties commit to “advance the right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment for present and future generations.”
The Arab Charter on Human Rights includes the right to a healthy environment as part of the right to an adequate standard of living.

At the national level, the right to a healthy environment is now legally recognized in more than 80 per cent of U.N. Member States (161 out of 193 States) through constitutions, legislation and regional treaties. A number of individual states in the United States have also amended their constitutions to include the right to a healthy environment.

On September 27, 2022, the Council of Europe recommended that all member states “actively consider recognizing at the national level [the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment] as a human right.

Photo Credit: The sky turns orange in San Francisco as a result of California wildfires during the early months of the Covid-19 pandemic. Climate change is expected to increase the severity and frequency of devastating wildfires and deadly disease outbreaks. Photo by Christopher Michel (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0).