The human rights and the environment

Abstract

Environmental law has progressed rapidly under the combined stimulus of ever more powerful means of inflicting irreversible environmental damage and an ever increasing awareness of the fragility of the global environment. Together these have brought about a universal concern with activities that may damage the global environment, which is the common inheritance of al1 nations, great and small. The relationship between the quality of the human environment and the enjoyment of basic human rights was first recognized by the UN General Assembly in the late 1960s. There are two ways to explain the relationship between human rights and environmental protection. First environmental protection may be cast as a means to the end of fulfilling human rights standards. Second, legal protection of human rights is an effective means to achieving the ends of conservation and environmental protection.