Clean environment access is a human right – UN declares
The United Nations Human Rights Council recognized access to a clean and healthy environment as a fundamental right on Friday, thereby joining the worldwide fight against climate change and its catastrophic repercussions.
Despite protests from several countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom, the vote was passed with overwhelming support.
The resolution, which was first considered in the 1990s and has the ability to alter global standards, is not legally enforceable. It might help lawyers create arguments in disputes involving the environment and human rights, say lawyers active in climate litigation.
“This is a historic breakthrough in a world where the global environmental catastrophe causes more than nine million premature lives per year,” said David Boyd, the United Nations special rapporteur on human rights and the environment.
According to Reuters, the text was offered by Costa Rica, the Maldives, Morocco, Slovenia, and Switzerland, was approved with 43 votes in favour and four abstentions from Russia, India, China, and Japan, provoking a rare flash of applause in the Geneva forum.
In a stunning, last-minute decision, Britain, which had been one of the proposal’s harshest critics during recent intensive discussions, voted in favour. Rita French, the UK’s ambassador to the United Nations in Geneva, said the UK was voting ‘yes’ because it shared the resolution’s sponsors’ desire to combat climate change, but that governments would not be bound by the resolution’s wording.
Because the United States is not a member of the 47-member Council, it did not vote.
The decision would “send a powerful message to communities around the world coping with climate adversity that they are not alone,” Costa Rica’s ambassador, Catalina Devandas Aguilar, said.
Critics have highlighted a number of concerns, including that the Council was not the appropriate body to make such decisions.
Before the voting, John Knox, a former United Nations special rapporteur, said those who opposed the resolution were “on the wrong side of history.”
Environmental dangers such as air pollution and chemical exposure are estimated to cause 13.7 million fatalities per year, or about 24.3 per cent of all deaths worldwide, according to the World Health Organization.
Source: Richard Mensah Adonu | Join our Telegram Group
On Friday, October 8, 2021, the Council also approved a request proposed by the Marshall Islands to form a new special rapporteur on climate change.
