Linking Human Rights and the Environment - Hardcover

Picolotti, Romina; Taillant, Jorge Daniel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0816522618 ISBN 13: 9780816522613

Publisher: University of Arizona Press, 2003

Synopsis

All over the world, people are experiencing the effects of ecosystem decline, from water shortages to fish kills to landslides on deforested slopes. The victims of environmental degradation tend to belong to more vulnerable sectors of society—racial and ethnic minorities and the poor—who regularly carry a disproportionate burden of such abuse. Increasingly, many basic human rights are being placed at risk, as the right to health affected by contamination of resources, or the right to property and culture compromised by commercial intrusion into indigenous lands. Despite the evident relationship between environmental degradation and human suffering, human rights violations and environmental degradation have been treated by most organizations and governments as unrelated issues. Just as human rights advocates have tended to place only civil and political rights onto their agendas, environmentalists have tended to focus primarily on natural resource preservation without addressing human impacts of environmental abuse. As a result, victims of environmental degradation are unprotected by the laws and mechanisms established to address human rights abuses. This book brings together contributions from human rights and environmental experts who have devoted much of their work to unifying these two spheres, particularly in the legal arena. It presents a variety of issues and approaches that address human rights and environmental links, demonstrating the growing interrelationship between human rights law and environmental advocacy. Its coverage includes reviews of existing international laws and treaties that establish the rights to a healthy environment, an overview of mechanisms that allow both individuals and groups to seek remedy for abuses, and specific cases that document efforts to seek redress for victims of environmental degradation through existing human rights protection mechanisms. Through examples ranging from water rights to women's rights, this collection offers practical ways in which environmental protection can be approached through human rights instruments. The volume reproduces a legal brief (amicus curiae) filed before an international human rights tribunal making the human rights and environment linkage argument, and includes the subsequent precedent-setting decision handed down by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights recognizing this linkage. Linking Human Rights and Environment is a valuable sourcebook that explores the uncharted territory that lies between environmental and human rights legislation. More than a theoretical treatise, it argues that human rights activism presents a significant opportunity to address the human consequences of environmental degradation and can serve as a catalyst for inspiring ideas and action in the real world.

About this title

About the Author

Taillant is its executive director, and Picolotti is the director of its Access to Justice Program.

From the Back Cover

"This volume, with its explicit focus on rights-protective mechanisms, provides a significant contribution to the literature by moving away from the current focus on victimization towards a politically informed examination of response. [It] will be a useful reader for students and scholars in the fields of international relations, law, political science, environmental studies, environmental sociology, and environmental anthropology [and] will be of interest to those members of the general public involved in human environmental rights advocacy." --Barbara Rose Johnson, Center for Political Ecology, Santa Cruz

"Uniquely valuable . . . Overall, the volume provides a clear, diverse, well-considered, well-presented, and thoroughly scholarly set of essays on the links between environment and human rights. . . . Many people share a broad, gut-level feeling that environmental and human rights issues are somehow linked. However, many efforts to illustrate those linkages have been simple, subjective arguments, often more romantic than academic. This collection of essays, by contrast, represents some of the first efforts to link environmental issues and human rights issues with the rigor and seriousness they deserve, and need if they are to become legal norms or public policy." --Theodore MacDonald, Jr., Program on Nonviolent Sanctions and Cultural Survival, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University

"The book as a whole makes a major contribution to our understanding of the complexity of human rights on the international scene. . . . It has applicability in every country with indigenous and/or poor people so that it will provide a useful source of data and the complex arguments that need to be understood about these problems." --Vine Deloria, Jr., author of Custer Died for Your Sins

From the Inside Flap

All over the world, people are experiencing the effects of ecosystem decline, from water shortages to fish kills to landslides on deforested slopes. The victims of environmental degradation tend to belong to more vulnerable sectors of society--racial and ethnic minorities and the poor--who regularly carry a disproportionate burden of such abuse. Increasingly, many basic human rights are being placed at risk, as the right to health affected by contamination of resources, or the right to property and culture compromised by commercial intrusion into indigenous lands.

Despite the evident relationship between environmental degradation and human suffering, human rights violations and environmental degradation have been treated by most organizations and governments as unrelated issues. Just as human rights advocates have tended to place only civil and political rights onto their agendas, environmentalists have tended to focus primarily on natural resource preservation without addressing human impacts of environmental abuse. As a result, victims of environmental degradation are unprotected by the laws and mechanisms established to address human rights abuses.

This book brings together contributions from human rights and environmental experts who have devoted much of their work to unifying these two spheres, particularly in the legal arena. It presents a variety of issues and approaches that address human rights and environmental links, demonstrating the growing interrelationship between human rights law and environmental advocacy. Its coverage includes reviews of existing international laws and treaties that establish the rights to a healthy environment, an overview of mechanisms that allow both individuals and groups to seek remedy for abuses, and specific cases that document efforts to seek redress for victims of environmental degradation through existing human rights protection mechanisms.

Through examples ranging from water rights to women's rights, this collection offers practical ways in which environmental protection can be approached through human rights instruments. The volume reproduces a legal brief (amicus curiae) filed before an international human rights tribunal making the human rights and environment linkage argument, and includes the subsequent precedent-setting decision handed down by the Inter-American Court on Human Rights recognizing this linkage.

Linking Human Rights and Environment is a valuable sourcebook that explores the uncharted territory that lies between environmental and human rights legislation. More than a theoretical treatise, it argues that human rights activism presents a significant opportunity to address the human consequences of environmental degradation and can serve as a catalyst for inspiring ideas and action in the real world.

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Arizona Press
• Publication date: 2003
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0816522618
• ISBN 13: 9780816522613
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 264