ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates why children, compared to adults and 25 years after the adoption of the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), need a separate environmental right in parallel to a general right considering the changed environment in which present and future generations will grow up. Exposure to environmental hazards is known or suspected to be responsible for a series of acute and chronic diseases that, in the industrialised countries, have replaced infectious diseases as the principal causes of illness and death in childhood. Almost from the time of the emergence of contemporary international environmental law in the late 1960s, a relationship between international human rights and international environmental law was strongly perceived. 'Environmental pollution' is explicitly mentioned in Article 24(2)(c) CRC on the right to health and health care because the article's aim is to combat child mortality owing to malnutrition and the lack of clean drinking water.
