Human Rights and Environmental Sustainability

Oil giant, climate saviour, or somewhere in between Human rights and the Norwegian climate paradox

“…Concerning international human rights law more specifically, the conception of a human right to a healthy environment (United Nations, 2021) is the latest attempt at approximating the human rights narrative to the sustainability framework through legal/judicial tools. However, we share Kerri Woods's doubt that the dominant paradigm of human rights can be appropriated for green ends (Woods, 2010), and some of the reasons for that are discussed below.…”

“…The relation between human rights and sustainability is also a contested one: while many environmental activists and scholars have framed environmental claims in the language of human rights, the dominant liberal/normative human rights framework often clashes with more 'radical demands' from environmental justice (Woods, 2010). However, there are many ways through which sustainability claims and human rights demands can indeed join forces in the task of advocating for a more just and sustainable future for humankind.…”

“…This has not occurred for sustainability because the 'principle' of sustainable development itself is not of a sufficiently definitive rule-creating character" (Bosselmann, 2010, p. 338). But in many cases, environmental human rights defenders have tied the concept of environmental sustainability to human rights principles when putting their cases forward against environmental threats to human dignity (Woods, 2010). Regarding the ECtHR particularly, the Court is usually concerned with the individual dimension of the sustainability pillar, given the 'practical and effective' doctrine, and not necessarily on the more idealistic goals of sustainable development or the intrinsic value of the environment in itself (Folkesson, 2013).…”

“The First Generation to End Poverty and the Last to Save the Planet?”—Western Individualism, Human Rights and the Value of Nature in the Ethics of Global Sustainable Development

“…There is, however, one striking exemption with regard to the framework-neutrality of the 2030 Agenda: the human rights framework is explicitly acknowledged as a shared principle and commitment and referenced at various occasions in the text [10] (pp. 4,6,9,29,32). Again, this is not surprising, given the historic importance of the UN Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 and its prominence as a legal frame of reference for the activities of the United Nations.…”

“…One could try to postulate a human right to a healthy environment, as John Knox the UN special rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment has recently suggested, and thus link sustainability to the idea of health [30]. Furthermore, the rights of future generation can be used to justify efforts to protect the planet and the eco-system [28,[31][32][33]. I will come back to this question later; let me only mention here already that most of the passages in the text that call for the protection of nature can indeed be read as being either implicitly or explicitly motivated by anthropocentric concerns.…”