ABSTRACT
While it can be said there is no legal ‘right to landscape’, landscape is implicated in a number of areas of international human rights law. There exists a human rights dimension to the landscape as expressed in the substantive right to a healthy environment; the procedural rights to information, public participation in the decision-making process and access to justice. There is also the cultural rights dimension to the landscape including access to one’s culture, the right to cultural development and the right to scientific and historical research. States have the responsibility towards the international community for protecting landscapes of special value, but they also have responsibility for their own citizens in providing access, information and means of participation in decisions affecting landscape as the setting of their lives. Since the entry into force of the European Landscape Convention (ELC) in 2004, the conceptual link between landscape and human rights assumes new resonance. This is because the ELC has shifted the focus from ‘landscapes’ to ‘landscape’; from conservation to ‘protection’, ‘management’ and ‘rehabilitation’; and from landscapes of ‘outstanding universal value’ to ‘everyday’ as well as ‘degraded landscapes’. The transformation of the concept of landscape from certain areas of conservation to the territory as a whole brings landscape closer to its earlier etymological origins, both Germanic and Latin, when it corresponded to a ‘close-up’ perspective: the territory of a small community. If we conceive of landscape as living space rather than as a detached view – which has been our association since the term re-emerged during the Renaissance – then it has a number of implications for human rights, democracy and access to justice.
