Article
The Right to a Healthy Environment and the Global South
AJIL Unbound
(2023)
Abstract
This essay explores the implications of the right to a healthy environment for the long-standing criticisms of international human rights law as a project and product of the Global North. It examines the Southern origins of the right to a healthy environment and its interpretations in regional human rights tribunals. The essay analyzes the responses offered by this evolving jurisprudence to various objections to human rights-based approaches to environmental protection. These include the human rights-based framework’s individualism, anthropocentrism, failure to address transboundary harm, and failure to challenge the economic law instruments that perpetuate environmental degradation.
Keywords
- human rights,
- right to a healthy environment,
- TWAIL,
- Global South,
- African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights,
- American Convention on Human Rights,
- Inter-American Court of Human Rights,
- anthropocentrism,
- collective human rights,
- transboundary harm,
- extraterritoriality,
- intergenerational equity
Disciplines
Publication Date
July 31, 2023
DOI
doi:10.1017/aju.2023.26
Citation Information
Carmen G Gonzalez. "The Right to a Healthy Environment and the Global South" AJIL Unbound Vol. 117 (2023) p. 173 - 178 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/carmen_gonzalez/73/