Question

Assess which laws have broken or which rights have been violeted concerning your chosen environmental issue (deforestation)​

Answer 1

Answer:

1

HUMAN RIGHTS, HEALTH AND ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION:

LINKAGES IN LAW AND PRACTICE

A Background Paper for the WHO1

International concerns with human rights, health and environmental protection have

expanded considerably in the past several decades. In response, the international community has

created a vast array of international legal instruments, specialized organs, and agencies at the global

and regional levels to respond to identified problems in each of the three areas. Often these have

seemed to develop in isolation from one another. Yet the links between human rights, health and

environmental protection were apparent at least from the first international conference on the human

environment, held in Stockholm in 1972. Indeed, health has seemed to be the subject that bridges

the two fields of environmental protection and human rights. At the Stockholm concluding session,

the participants proclaimed that

Man is both creature and moulder of his environment, which gives him physical

sustenance and affords him the opportunity for intellectual, moral, social and spiritual

growth. . . . Both aspects of mans environment, the natural and the man-made, are

essential to his well-being and to the enjoyment of basic human rights -

even the right

to life itself.2

Principle 1 of the Stockholm Declaration established a foundation for linking human rights, health,

and environmental protection, declaring that

Man has the fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life,

in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being.

In resolution 45/94 the UN General Assembly recalled the language of Stockholm, stating that all

individuals are entitled to live in an environment adequate for their health and well-being. The

resolution called for enhanced efforts towards ensuring a better and healthier environment.

In the three decades since the Stockholm Conference, the links that were established by these

first declaratory statements have been reformulated and elaborated in various ways in international

legal instruments and the decisions of human rights bodies. In large part, these instruments and

decisions involve taking a rights-based approach to the topics, albeit with different emphases. The

first approach, perhaps closest to that of the Stockholm Declaration, understands environmental