Environmental Human Rights and Intergenerational Justice

Author(s):  
Richard P. Hiskes
Author(s):  
Knox John H

This chapter examines the relationship between human rights and the environment, which has developed through the adoption and interpretation of many different national constitutions and laws, human rights treaties, and multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs). The development of what might be called ‘environmental human rights law’ has occurred in three main channels. First, efforts to achieve recognition of a human right to a healthy environment, while ineffective at the UN, have achieved widespread success at the national and regional levels. Second, some multilateral environmental instruments have incorporated human rights norms, especially rights of access to information, public participation, and remedy. Third, human rights tribunals and other monitoring bodies have ‘greened’ human rights law by applying a wide range of human rights to environmental harm. The chapter explains each of these paths of development before sketching potential lines of further development through recognition of the rights of nature and of future generations.


2021 ◽  
pp. 29-52
Author(s):  
Richard P. Hiskes

This chapter conceptually links children’s human rights with environmental human rights. Environmental rights initially belong to future generations because they are uniquely vulnerable to environmental harms perpetuated by those living today, and consequently belong to living generations through “reflexive reciprocity.” Children in fact represent the first, “living” future generation. Therefore they share environmental rights with future generations. Those rights are uniquely “emergent” in nature for both children and future persons; they emerge at the group level. They are also rights that take special priority over adult human rights, based on the vulnerability of both children and future groups.


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