Granting the Right to a Quality Environment - A Premise of Sustainable Development

In the dynamics of national and international regulations, an important threshold has been crossed - the recognition and granting of the fundamental right to environment. The applicable international documents formulate the idea of an individual right to a specific quality of the environment. Certain documents consecrate yet another minimalistic perspective, according to which the right to environment is only infringed when the right to life itself is threatened, considering that only significant degradations of environmental quality may endanger the vital biological needs for the survival of mankind. We must nevertheless stress that although there is no direct and unanimous recognition of a right to environment per se, an indirect acknowledgement of it can still be seen in the connection established between the fundamental human rights (the right to life, the right to health, the right to freedom, etc.) and the quality to the environmental factors, which underlines the fact that the compliance with the environmental dispositions is a prerequisite for insuring optimal life conditions. We must also note that there has been a reversal of the environment - development relation. Thus, if in the beginning the environment could not be understood without development, it was later stipulated that sustainable development cannot exist without the existence of a quality environment