ABSTRACT
In March 2012 the Human Rights Council created the three-year post of Independent Expert on ‘the issue of human rights obligations related to the enjoyment of a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment’. This chapter examines human rights in the broader context of its interaction with international environmental law. Clearly there have been many developments in the field of environmental human rights in the past decade and these will be articulated and is dedicated to environmental law as a discipline. Such an examination of environmental law is necessary in order to discover its rationale, the values it enshrines as well as its limits. The links between human rights and the environment began properly in the 1960s with early notions of development. Today the three legal approaches to environmental human rights are well established, namely the reinterpretation or ‘greening’ of relevant existing rights, procedural environmental rights and a substantive right to a healthy environment.
