The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) are organizing a High-level Expert Meeting on the topic The New Future of Human Rights and Environment: Moving the Global Agenda Forward. The meeting is scheduled to take place at UNEP’s headquarters in Nairobi from 30 November to 1 December 2009.
The Meeting will seek to raise the understanding between human rights and environment and identify how the momentum built by
the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights’ Report on Human Rights and climate change and Resolution 10/4 can be maintained and perpetuated into other areas of the environment.
Resolution 10/4 on Climate Change and Human Rights marked a watershed in recognizing the link between the full enjoyment of human rights and the impact of climate change. It was the first time that governments multilaterally agreed that a global environmental problem had directs link to fundamental rights such as the right to life, right to food, and self-determination. While in many ways the Resolution was a victory of sorts it also serves as a stark reminder of the work that is still required to deepen the political and legal connection between human rights and other environmental issues.
There are three main dimensions to the interrelationship between human rights and environmental protection:
- the environment as a pre-requisite to the enjoyment of existing human rights (implying that human rights obligations of states should include the duty to ensure the level of environmental protection necessary to allow full exercise of protected rights);
- certain human rights, especially rights to information, participation in governance, and the right to a remedy, as essential to good environmental decision-making (implying that human rights must be implemented in order to ensure environmental protection); and
- the right to a safe, healthy and ecologically-balanced environment as a human right in itself (this is a debated approach).
Recently, new interesting dimensions of the linkages between human rights and environment have emerged that contribute to making this topic very crucial to the sustainable development agenda:
- The findings of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2005) that have made explicit the contribution of ecosystem services to human well-being, which is broken down into a series of “constituents” of well being, which can be related to human rights; and
- The emergence of a human rights dimension in the context of climate change discussions. Resolution 7/23 entitled “human rights and climate change”, adopted by the Human Rights Council in March 2008, expressed concern that “climate change poses an immediate and far-reaching threat to people and communities around the world and has implications for the full enjoyment of human rights”. On 25 March 2009, the Council adopted resolution 10/4 “Human rights and climate change” in which it, inter alia, notes that “climate change-related impacts have a range of implications, both direct and indirect, for the effective enjoyment of human rights …” International negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are at a critical juncture and set to culminate at the conference in Copenhagen in December 2009. At stake is a new global deal to effectively combat climate change and respond to those effects which are now unavoidable.
The expected outputs of the Meeting are:
- A high level discourse on the linkages between human rights and the environment;
- A road map for bridging the human rights and environment agendas through legal, policy and governance solutions;
- A monograph of the papers prepared for the conference and the conclusions, and a legal cases and materials book;
- A programme for UNEP and other UN agencies on Human Rights and Environment.