Environmental Protection and Human Rights

With unique scholarly analysis and practical discussion, this book provides a comprehensive introduction to the relationship between environmental protection and human rights being formalized into law in many legal systems. By illuminating human rights theory and the institutions that can be employed to meet environmental goals, this book instructs on environmental techniques and procedures that assist in the protection of human rights. The text provides cogent guidance on a growing international jurisprudence on the promotion and protection of human rights in relation to the environment that has been developed by international and regional human rights bodies and tribunals. It explores a rich body of case law that continues to develop within states on the environmental dimension of the rights to life, to health, and to public participation and access to information. Five compelling contemporary case studies are included that implicate human rights and the environment, ranging from large dam projects, to the creation of a new human rights, to a clean environment.

Donald K. Anton has been practising and teaching international law and environmental law since 1988. Since 2000, he has been a member of the faculty of the Australian National University (ANU) College of Law, where he teaches international environmental law, international law, marine and coastal law, international climate law and environmental law. He is the author or co-author of International Environmental Law: Cases, Materials, and Problems (2007), International Law: Cases and Materials (2005), International Law: Politics, Values and Functions (1998) and A Question of Justice Challenge: Global Environmental Protection (1996).

Dinah L. Shelton is the Manatt/Ahn Professor of International Law at the George Washington University Law School and a member of the Inter-American Human Rights Commission of the Organization of American States. Shelton is the author or editor of three prize-winning books: Protecting Human Rights in the Americas (co-authored with Thomas Buergenthal), Remedies in International Human Rights Law, and the three-volume Encyclopedia of Genocide and Crimes Against Humanity. She was also awarded the Elisabeth Haub Prize for Environmental Law.