An aspiration: Formal UN recognition of the right to a healthy environment

REPORTS around the world reveal continued suffering and loss of lives of environmental or nature defenders with nearly 40 percent coming from indigenous communities. They suffer from the adverse health impacts of pollution, forced relocation due to sea level rise or natural disasters exacerbated by climate change or assassination for standing up for the land and ecosystems on which their lives/communities depend.

When the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which laid the foundation for the United Nations, was adopted more than 70 years ago, there was little awareness that effective enjoyment of human rights depends on a clean, safe and healthy environment. Despite a number of international human rights treaties, which recognize specific aspects of the environment (e.g., right to information, awareness and education on environmental matters or the importance of environmental conditions to the exercise of the right to health) the matter of the right to a healthy environment was never formally recognized by the UN.