scholarly journals Sustainability, human rights, and environmental justice

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Catherine A. Hawkins
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Work ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Call To Action ◽  
Healthy Environment ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Systems Perspective

Social work has a long-standing tradition of emphasizing the interaction of people and their environment, although this systems perspective has focused almost exclusively on the importance of social relationships. There is an emerging emphasis within the profession regarding the need to pay more attention to the critical role of the physical environment. The last fifty years has seen a growing global ecological movement, and the profession is joining the call to action for sustainability. Social work must extend this mission to include environmental justice, the human right to live in a clean, safe, and healthy environment. The world’s most poor, vulnerable, and oppressed people often live in the most degraded environments and have no control over resources. The important connections between social work, sustainability, human rights, and environmental justice in our contemporary world need to be more clearly articulated in the scholarly literature. An understanding of these separate but closely linked concepts is necessary for the profession to effectively pursue the goal of making the world a more just, humane, and sustainable home for all life.

scholarly journals Protection of Vulnerable Communities: A Case of Coal-Ash Disaster in Puerto Rico

2020 ◽  
pp. 379
Author(s):  
Sarah Dávila-Ruhaak
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Environmental Justice ◽  
Coal Ash ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Healthy Environment ◽  
Vulnerable Communities ◽  
Access To Health ◽  
The Right

The connection between the environment and human rights is not a surprising one. The enjoyment of human rights depends on a person’s ability to live free from interference and to have his or her rights protected. The interdependence of human rights and the protection of the environment is manifested in the full and effective enjoyment of the right to a healthy environment. This article argues that in order to protect vulnerable persons and communities facing environmental harm, a human rights framework—specifically the right to a healthy environment—must be applied. A human rights approach complements environmental justice work, recognizing that individuals and communities affected by environmental harm are rights-holders entitled to protection. Such communities are left out of important decisions about their environment and the effect of environmental harm in their lives. Individuals most vulnerable to environmental harm are often members of poor, rural, and disenfranchised communities. The destruction of the environment disproportionately affects these communities, preventing them from accessing basic natural resources, clean water and sanitation, adequate housing, food security, and access to health and medical assistance. Additionally, intersecting forms of discrimination exacerbate exclusion and marginalization. A human rights approach to environmental justice emphasizes the need to protect affected communities and holds the State responsible for recognizing their vulnerability and providing heightened protection. This article seeks to show that while the human right to a healthy environment has not been widely recognized, a robust juridical framework enables environmental justice advocates and affected communities to vindicate the rights of vulnerable communities. The case study of coal-ash contamination in Puerto Rico and the harms suffered by affected communities there anchors the argument for why advocates should use a human rights framework to protect the rights of the most vulnerable. The case of Puerto Rico is illustrative of so many poor, disenfranchised, and vulnerable communities around the world, affected by environmental harm and in need of a human rights-based framework.

Citizenship and Rights of Children

2020 ◽  
pp. 221-236
Author(s):  
David B. Thronson
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Daily Life ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Forced Migration ◽  
Children's Rights ◽  
Children’S Rights ◽  
Central Factor ◽  
Family Unity

Citizenship plays a larger and more critical role in the life of children than it should. Children who lack citizenship are incredibly vulnerable to exploitation. In the migration context, a child’s citizenship can be largely determinative of where and with whom a child lives. Despite a modern children’s rights framework that recognizes the humanity and autonomy of children, citizenship and nationality still form an integral part of a child’s identity and play a critical role in a child’s development. It has a pervasive impact in securing other rights for children and can be a central factor in a child’s cultural and linguistic background, education, economic and environment exposures, and virtually all aspects of a child’s daily life. This chapter examines children’s right to citizenship and explores the ongoing crisis of statelessness that undermines these rights. It reviews the role that citizenship plays in both voluntary and forced migration of children, child-specific protections found in both universal and regional human rights frameworks, and the role of children’s citizenship in promoting family unity.

scholarly journals The Determinants of Access to Sanitation: The Role of Human Rights and the Challenges of Measurement

Water ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (12) ◽  
pp. 1676
Author(s):  
Rebecca Schiel ◽  
Bruce M. Wilson ◽  
Malcolm Langford
Keyword(s):  
Sustainable Development ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
Field Data ◽  
Data Availability ◽  
Regression Analyses ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Sustainable Development Goal ◽  
Development Goal ◽  
The Sustainable Development

Ten years after the United Nation’s recognition of the human right to water and sanitation (HRtWS), little is understood about how these right impacts access to sanitation. There is limited identification of the mechanisms responsible for improvements in sanitation, including the international and constitutional recognition of rights to sanitation and water. We examine a core reason for the lack of progress in this field: data quality. Examining data availability and quality on measures of access to sanitation, we arrive at three findings: (1) where data are widely available, measures are not in line with the Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) targets, revealing little about changes in sanitation access; (2) data concerning safe sanitation are missing in more country-year observations than not; and (3) data are missing in the largest proportions from the poorest states and those most in need of progress on sanitation. Nonetheless, we present two regression analyses to determine what effect rights recognition has on improvements in sanitation access. First, the available data are too limited to analyze progress toward meeting SDGs related to sanitation globally, and especially in regions most urgently needing improvements. Second, utilizing more widely available data, we find that rights seem to have little impact on access.

Part VII Inter-linkages with Other Regimes, Ch.45 Human Rights

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Knox John H
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Multilateral Environmental Agreements ◽  
Healthy Environment ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Human Rights Treaties ◽  
Environmental Human Rights ◽  
Human Rights Norms

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.

The Right to Health

2018 ◽  
pp. 231-264
Author(s):  
Sandra Fredman
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Reproductive Health ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Right To Health ◽  
Individual Rights ◽  
Personal Integrity ◽  
Human Right ◽  
The Right ◽  
The Way

Is health a human right? Many would maintain that it is not. On this view health and ill-health are due to natural causes, not to State actions. Others are concerned that health raises too many polycentric problems to be dealt with through justiciable human rights. These contestations have shaped the way in which the right to health is understood. Section II sketches out the health context. Section III considers jurisdictions in which there is no express right to health, but a right has been derived from rights to life, personal integrity, or privacy. Section IV contrasts this approach with jurisdictions with an express right to health. Section V examines the role of the right to equality, while section VI focuses on reproductive health. The final section returns to the challenges of polycentricity and the extent to which a justiciable right can address systemic issues rather than individual rights to medication.

The Human Right to Science and Its Relationship to International Environmental Law

2020 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 625-656
Author(s):  
Anna-Maria Hubert
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Potential Contribution ◽  
International Human Rights Law ◽  
Human Right ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
Environmental Regimes ◽  
The Right

Abstract This article explores the potential contribution of international human rights law – specifically, the oft-neglected ‘right to science’ – to the interpretation, operation and progressive development of international environmental law. Science and its applications play a critical role in environmental protection. At the same time, society faces persistent controversies at this interface. Environmental regimes may lack sufficient norms and tools for regulating upstream science and innovation processes because they tend to focus narrowly on physical harms to the environment and may not address the wider ethical, legal, social and political concerns. The human right to science, which is codified in various international and regional human rights instruments, may serve to augment international environmental law and contribute to more effective, equitable and democratically legitimate and accountable processes and outcomes in relation to the application of science and technology in environmental regimes. The article begins by outlining the scope and contents of, as well as the limitations on, the right to science, focusing on Article 15(1)(b) of the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR) and its overlaps with the norms of international environmental law.1 It then analyses the ways in which the right to science may influence the development of international environmental law by elucidating mechanisms for the integration of a human rights perspective in science and technology and by outlining its potential substantive contributions to the development of international environmental law.

scholarly journals Facing financialization in the housing sector: A human right to adequate housing for all

2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (2) ◽  
pp. 94-114
Author(s):  
Ingrid Leijten ◽  
Kaisa de Bel
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Financial Markets ◽  
Dominant Role ◽  
Local Level ◽  
Wealth Accumulation ◽  
Housing Conditions ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Social Good ◽  
The Right

Housing is increasingly seen as a vehicle for wealth accumulation rather than a social good. ‘Financialization’ of housing refers to the expanding and dominant role of financial markets and corporations in the field of housing, leading to unaffordable and insufficient housing and discrimination. Although clearly linked to the right to adequate housing, financialization and its effects are not often viewed from a human rights perspective. This article fleshes out this important link by illuminating the standards set in relation to the right to adequate housing enshrined in Article 11(1) ICESCR. It is shown that recently, human rights bodies have confronted the issue of financialization more directly, translating general requirements to this particular issue. Moreover, efforts at UN level are mirrored in initiatives at the local level, signalling the beginning of a shift towards a paradigm that complies with human rights. The financialization of housing and the response of human rights also allow for addressing a more general issue, namely the potential of majority protection in times of human rights backlash. In this regard, it is worth emphasising that human rights such as the right to adequate housing protect not only the extreme poor. In the context of financialization, this may contribute to better housing conditions as well as reconnect people to their human rights.

A Human Right to a Clean and Healthy Environment: Dream or Reality in Europe?

elni Review ◽  
2011 ◽  
pp. 27-35
Author(s):  
Jan van de Venis
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Global Scale ◽  
European Convention ◽  
Human Right ◽  
Short Article ◽  
Healthy Environment ◽  
Human Rights Based Approach

Do we have a ‘human right to environment’ in Europe? In this short article, the author gives an introduction to (the development of) the human right to (a healthy) environment and briefly answers the question set out above. This article introduces the topic of human rights and the environment on a global scale. It sets out to inform the reader where this human rights-based approach to environmental issues came from, what tangible benefits such a right could bring and where it currently stands globally and, more specifically, in Europe under the European Convention on Human Rights. It therefore also analyses the recent Council of Europe’s Committee of Ministers refusal of a Parliamentary Assembly recommendation on acknowledging a right to environment under the European Convention.

scholarly journals African Migrant Narratives, Modern Slavery, and Human Rights Violations in Libya

2020 ◽  
pp. 48-67
Author(s):  
Lady Adaina Ajayi ◽  
Anijesushola O. Ajayi ◽  
Sheriff F. Folarin ◽  
Abdulrahman Oluwaseyi Tiamiyu ◽  
Chioma Eucharia Nnajidema ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Human Rights Violations ◽  
Research Approach ◽  
Human Right ◽  
African Migrants ◽  
Modern Slavery ◽  
African Migrant ◽  
The Media ◽  
Sub Saharan

Libya has served as the entrepôt for the modern slave trade from Africa to Europe for many decades. In recent years, however, international bodies, as well as the media, have raised deep concerns on the unimaginable horrors Sub-Saharan African migrants are forced to witness and experience during their stay and transit through Libya. It is against this background that this study through the ‘narrative research approach' sought to examine the various patterns of human rights violations experienced by African migrants in Libya as well as the role of the media in exposing the horrific trends of modern slavery. The study finds horrific patterns of human right violations perpetuated by both state and non-state actors in Libya. In addition, the media has played significant roles in serving as a major and reliable source of information on this phenomenal migration of the new age as well as a mediating body between policymakers and migrants. However, the complacency of governments whose citizens have and are being abused represents a more complex migration issue that needs to be addressed.

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