Today we'd like to highlight the movement for the Right to a Healthy Environment (R2HE).
This campaign started more than a decade ago with the work of John Knox, David Boyd, Dan Magraw, and the Center for International Enviromental Law (CIEL), and has grown into a coalition of over 1,500 civil society organizations, social movements and Indigenous groups (see the signatories here). In October 2021, this coalition of organizations advocated to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, which approved “R2HE.” And in an historic declaration in July 2022, the UN General Assembly recognized the Right to a Healthy Environment as a basic human right. Recognition of new basic human rights is quite rare, and the last declaration was back in 2010 (the right to water and sanitation). In June 2023, a conference was held on “The Right to a Healthy Environment: Looking Ahead,” and here you'll find the report that came out of that conference. Last December, this international campaign received the United Nations Human Rights Award.
This 2023 UN document is a good introduction to the topic and highlights the major achievements thus far in this effort: “What is the Right to a Healthy Environment?”
The UN resolutions on the right to a healthy environment provided a much-need jolt of hope to a world struggling to cope with a devastating pandemic and a climate emergency. As soon as the resolutions were adopted, people began to ask: What next? How can we turn these inspiring words into tangible, concrete actions that will improve peoples’ lives and protect this uniquely beautiful and biodiverse planet? The Guide seeks to answer these questions by looking into how the right can be used to prevent unsustainable and unjust laws, policies, projects and plans proposed by governments and businesses, and how it can be used to advance the transformative and systemic changes urgently needed to achieve a just and sustainable future. The User's Guide aims to provide useful and inspiring advice to civil society, social movements and communities on how to accelerate implementation of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. All people must have clean air to breathe, safe water to drink, healthy food to eat, a safe climate for themselves and their children and flourishing biodiversity for present and future generations. Transforming today’s economic systems based on exploiting people and nature, is the biggest challenge facing humanity. But I believe that by working together we can achieve the just and sustainable future that so many people so deeply desire. This User's Guide can be seen as a small step on that journey. It is obvious that we have a long distance to travel and many mountains to climb before everyone, everywhere, fully enjoys their right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. But as I have said to countless amazing activists and environmental human rights defenders across the world I have met along this journey: We are strongest when we use our voices together in global harmony.
Check out these additional resources:
- Parliament of the World's Religions: The Right to a Healthy Environment
- Center for Earth Ethics Blog: The Right to a Healthy Environment
- UNEP: In historic move, UN declares healthy environment a human right
- R2HE Toolkit by NYU Law
- UniversalRights.org: Unpacking R2HE
- Open Global Rights: Series of articles on R2HE
John Knox
Duke University School of Law
September 17, 2019
Dr David Boyd UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment on the Rights of Nature
Temple of Understanding
EcoJustice for All Dialogue Series
October 12, 2023