William & Mary Environmental Law and Policy Review
Abstract
In July 2022, the United Nations General Assembly passed Resolution 76/300 (“the Resolution”)—affirming a human right to clean, healthy, and sustainable environment (“environmental human rights”). The Resolution essentially affirms a linkage between environmental human rights and “other rights and existing international law,” and “calls upon States, international organizations, business enterprises and other relevant stakeholders to adopt policies, to enhance international cooperation, strengthen capacity-building and continue to share good practices,” to achieve environmental human rights.
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This Article offers a glass half-full perspective on the Resolution, with the caveat that the glass could rapidly become empty unless the right is internalized into domestic legal systems and international agreements that directly or indirectly impact environmental human rights.
Specifically, this Article asserts that the Resolution is a net positive development for two reasons: 1) the historical importance of contemporary human rights, notably the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (“UDHR”), in framing the normative discourse on international law as a “universal,” rather than “sovereign,” subject matter, and 2) its potential to return international environmental discourse to a human rights–based approach initially taken in the 1970s, which is especially important as environmental problems increasingly impose transboundary environmental harms on established human rights. This Article further proposes that the efficacy of the Resolution rests on the ability of nations to not only fully implement multilateral environmental agreements under the principles of international environmental law, but also to cohesively and systematically review from a lens of human rights the defragmented approach to treaty negotiations that at once promote and negate efforts to meaningfully address environmental problems, as in the case of international trade agreements.
Further, the Article asserts that the efficacy of environmental human rights suffers the same limitation as human rights enforcement in international law and the limits of international governance structures. These limitations can be acutely felt in the case of transboundary environmental harms that impact human rights, because unlike traditional human rights cases, the remedies lie outside the purview of domestic law. Thus, in addition to reviewing the normative compatibility of existing international treaties, this Article further suggests that meaningful next steps should include the creation of systematic governance systems— including judicial mechanisms—to address cases of transboundary environmental human rights wrongs.
This abstract has been taken from the author's introduction.