Are there environmental human rights?

Abstract

The earliest, and still most influential, human rights texts were drafted at a time when environmental considerations held a low priority in world politics. It is therefore unsurprising that environmental factors were not even mentioned in the original legal definition of human rights. Given the rise in the salience of environmental politics in recent years, this research examines which environmental conditions can be legitimately claimed as universal human rights. Two environmental human rights are subsequently identified; (i) the right to an environmental free from toxic pollution and (ii) the right to natural resources.

The topic of environmental human rights has generated significant interest in the discipline of international law since the early 1990s. In focusing on how political power relates to the subject, this thesis fills a significant gap in the existing literature and contributes to the growing interdisciplinary discourse on environmental human rights. In particular, environmental degradation and human rights violations caused by the capitalist system are normalised and made invisible by the dynamics of power. Therefore, a human rights perspective based on ecological values reveals how harmful acts have been both constructed and legitimised by the power relations of capitalism.

More information

Identifiers

Catalogue record

Export record

ASCII CitationAtomBibTeXData Cite XMLDublin CoreDublin CoreEP3 XMLEndNoteHTML CitationHTML CitationHTML ListJSONMETSMODSMPEG-21 DIDLOpenURL ContextObjectOpenURL ContextObject in SpanRDF+N-TriplesRDF+N3RDF+XMLRIOXX2 XMLReferReference ManagerSimple Metadata