Literature Review

The Inter-American Court will likely be the first regional human rights tribunal to develop an advisory opinion on the climate emergency, prompting normative effects for climate justice beyond the legal realm.

Environmental human rights defenders face danger and sometimes even death for their tireless work protecting the environment.

The United States, the European Union, and Germany have recently adopted or proposed new rules requiring enhanced due diligence in supply chains, targeting human rights and environmental issues. This alert examines key differences among the regimes and highlights compliance considerations.

As the global mass movement to address the urgent need to co-design and co-build a new eco-social world grows, so does the engagement of social workers globally. The profession has a long history of social action and advocacy, with the context of community and systems engagement reflective of the diversity of our profession together in our communities. The growing crisis of climate change, pandemics, environmental destruction, conflict and global inequality (including lack of social protection systems) diminish human and environmental rights that find social workers with a critical role in this global movement to address these inequities.

Environmental Human Rights defenders, including Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, women and youth, continue to shape global discussions and actions to address the climate and biodiversity crisis.

The world is facing a plastics crisis. Plastic pollution is found all around the globe. Plastics are negatively affecting people and the environment at each stage of their lifecycle – extraction of fossil fuel, production, manufacturing, use, recycling, and disposal. The impacts are felt in a wide range of areas, including on biodiversity, climate change, human health and human rights. This page focuses on the impacts of plastics and the chemicals they contain on human health.

The Strasbourg Principles were drafted by a group of human rights and environmental law experts who were brought together by the Conference ‘Human Rights for the Planet’ held in 2020 at the European Court of Human Right in Strasbourg and by the present Special Issue of the Journal of Human Rights and the Environment.*The Strasbourg Principles of International Environmental Human Rights Law are a uniform restatement of general principles that have emerged in international human rights law in the context of the environment. They are intended to be used by judges and other legal professionals engaged in international litigation of environmental matters.

Issues of environmental justice – meaning the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies – have been of concern to the international community for many years, including in the context of human rights and environmental protection. In the United States (U.S.), EPA has taken a leading role in government efforts to address environmental justice issues.

To better understand the nature of this historical judgment, it is important to recall some of the most important legislative progressions that characterized international climate change law before 2013.

Some “new” rights have recently been added to the international human rights catalogue, such as the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. These new rights protect global public goods, i.e. goods that benefit the totality of all States and all individuals together. They are thus different from the “old” human rights, such as the right to life, the right to liberty and security of person, the right to liberty of movement, and so on, whose beneficiary is the individual as individual.

In the years prior to the ground-breaking Urgenda Foundation v. the Netherlands judgment, the phenomenon of judicial claims lamenting violations of the human right to a healthy environment was one that already had manifested itself. The use of an alternative pathway to policy-making, given the complexities that surrounded political consensus on a formal affirmation, cannot be catalogued as a surprise.

For the longest time, the right to a healthy environment has been included in the theoretical category of “emerging rights” (Marks, 1980). This “emerging” status, fitting for an age in which the dramatic urgency of climate change had not consolidated itself yet, grew to become more and more inadequate with the development of strong scientific consensus on these aspects.