Environment rights in human rights courts

There is a growing recognition that protection of the environment is necessary in order to protect a wide range of human rights, including the right to life, the right to an adequate standard of living and the right to the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health. At the same time, recognition of a specific right to a healthy or sustainable environment is increasing at national level, in national constitutions and in internationally, in regional human rights treaties.

As a consequence, human rights courts are increasingly being called upon to adjudicate environmental rights claims.

The following publications explore a number of questions surrounding the growing environmental rights jurisprudence:

• E Grant Judicial implementation of rights-based approaches to environmental governance: Regional Perspectives in E Daly, L Kotze, J May, and C Soyapi (eds), New Frontiers in Environmental Constitutionalism (UNEP 2017).
• E Grant, International Human Rights Courts and Environmental Human rights: Re-Imagining Adjudicative Paradigms (2015) 6 Journal of Human Rights and the Environment 156–176.
• A Grear and E Grant (eds), Thought, Law, Rights and Action in the Age of Environmental Crisis (Edward Elgar 2015).
• Grant, E Re-imagining Adjudication: Human Rights Courts and the Environment in A Grear and E Grant (eds), Thought, Law, Rights and Action in the Age of Environmental Crisis (Edward Elgar 2015) 155-187.
• E Grant, International courts and environmental human rights: Re-imagining adjudicative paradigms in A Grear and L Kotzé, Research Handbook on Human Rights and the Environment (Edward Elgar 2015) 379-400.