AAAS Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program

Environment and Human Rights Project

Integrating Human Rights and the Environment Within the United Nations

Submission of the Science and Human Rights Program of the American Association for the Advancement of Science to the Joint OHCHR-UNEP Seminar on Human Rights and the Environment

Geneva, January 16, 2002

Audrey R. Chapman, Ph.D., Director
Sage Russell, Senior Program Associate

Science and Human Rights Program
Directorate for Science and Policy Program
American Association for the Advancement of Science

Recommendations Concerning the Integration of Human Rights and the Environment Within the United Nations

Introduction

1. The rapid approach of the World Summit for Sustainable Development provides the impetus for this meeting, a long overdue recognition within the United Nations of the intrinsic links between human rights and the environment. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and UNEP should take full advantage of this opportunity to begin the process of recognizing, developing and realizing the environmental dimensions of human rights, as well as the human rights dimensions of environmental protection. To the extent practicable at this late date, the OHCHR should use the opportunity the WSSD provides to incorporate human rights into the environmental agenda in a sustained and sustainable way, participating in the remaining PrepComs as well as at the summit itself. UNDP and other development-related UN bodies should be included in the dialogue as well. Sustainable development is at least as important a theme as the environment on the Johannesburg agenda, as evidenced by its inclusion in the title of the conference. The environmental and sustainable development communities both within and outside the United Nations may not realize the extent to which accomplishment of their goals depends upon the integration of human rights into their work, and the OHCHR can play an important role in changing that. The UN as a whole has a responsibility to see that the OHCHR has the resources it needs for this work.
   
   
2. Kofi Annan’s Millennium Report makes clear the interconnectedness between human rights and the environment. To the familiar principles of freedom from want and freedom from fear, the Report added environmental stewardship. The responsibility of leaving a healthy and life-sustaining planet for our children—and their children after them—is not only consistent with the more traditional articulations of human rights, but is indispensable to realizing them. It is clear that human rights cannot be fully understood or realized without taking account of their environmental dimensions. It is equally true that the health and sustainability of the environment cannot be fully realized in the absence of human rights.
   
   
3. Incorporating human rights offers many advantages to environmental work. In Agenda 21’s comprehensive vision of a sustainable future and articulation of the steps to reach it, human rights are largely implicit and must be read into the document. Fundamental human rights principles of nondiscrimination, participation and attention to vulnerable groups inform Agenda 21, but they are not identified as human rights with corresponding state obligations. In general, these ideas appear instead as hallmarks of fairness, equity or good development practice. A rights-based approach provides the means to effect sustainable change, beginning with the awareness that every individual has a right to live in an environment that can shelter, nourish and sustain him or her.
   
   
4. Attention to human rights in designing and implementing environmental or sustainable development projects promotes many of the desirable outcomes that are called for in the environmental and development literature. A human rights approach is based on participation, transparency, non-discrimination, and a focus on the most vulnerable members of the population. The individual is a rights holder, not the beneficiary of a program or member of a target population. A human rights approach gives the individual a claim or set of claims against the government, with avenues of recourse provided through the legal system if the government does not live up to its obligations.
   
   
5. A human rights approach also comes with practical advantages. It ensures that decision-making is the result of a multi-stakeholder process that is equitable, participatory, sensitive to the most vulnerable members of the population, and that builds capacity. Any undertaking will be more successful and sustainable if the people who are affected by it are fully involved in all stages of planning and implementation. This is already acknowledged as sound development practice. However, the entire character of the exercise changes when participation is a right, rather than a policy or best practice of project managers, and people are the subjects not the objects of development.

The AAAS Project in Human Rights and the Environment

6. The Science and Human Rights Program (SHR) of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has worked on human rights and environmental issues for several years. A year ago we received funding from the Richard & Rhoda Goldman Fund for a three-year project on monitoring the environmental components of existing human rights. Unlike other projects in this field, which have tended to focus on civil and political rights, ours is directed to the environmental dimensions of economic, social and cultural rights. Within this framework, we are concentrating on the rights to health, food, water and a clean and healthy environment in general. The first two rights are recognized at the international level. The latter two rights are included in the Bill of Rights of the 1996 South African Constitution (in the form of access to sufficient water (Ch. 2, Art. 27(1)(b)) and to an environment "not harmful to . . . health and well-being" (Ch. 2, Art. 24)). We are working in partnership with NGOs with expertise in these rights.
   
   
7. The human rights and environment project builds on SHR’s long experience in producing resource materials for monitoring economic, social and cultural rights. Like our work in economic, social and cultural rights, our work in linking environmental protection and human rights operates on two tracks: interpreting existing human rights, in this case to make clear their environmental dimensions, and developing monitoring tools and resources for them. Part of the project will be based in South Africa, which is in the lead internationally in recognizing the human rights dimensions of environmental protection. Another project component entails establishing a database to help protect the traditional ecological rights of indigenous groups. We would also like to work with the OHCHR and the UN treaty monitoring bodies on incorporating environmental standards into the committees’ interpretations of the human rights under their purview and their review of the performance of states parties, and we hope that this meeting will help to launch that process.

Integrating the Environmental Dimensions of Existing Human Rights

8. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, as the focal point and secretariat for human rights within the United Nations, has a central role to play in incorporating environmental awareness into the UN’s human rights work, as well as human rights awareness into the UN’s environmental and sustainable development work. In many cases, this initiative can be incorporated into the ongoing effort to mainstream human rights throughout the UN. We believe that the following approaches and steps will help to bring this about.
   
   
9. The OHCHR should incorporate environmental issues, concerns and principles into its, consciously, explicitly and in detail, beginning with a comprehensive review to determine where inclusion of this focus is appropriate. Existing human rights cannot be fully understood and implemented without taking account of their environmental components. For example, the rights to health, food, safe working conditions and nondiscrimination cannot be realized without attention to environmental concerns such as clean drinking water, sanitation, the use of pesticides, the international trade in persistent organic pollutants (POPs), indoor air pollution, or the siting of hazardous waste facilities in minority and poor communities. This point is already well accepted in its broad outlines, and it is made explicit in more recent UN human rights documents such as the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child, and General Comment No. 14 on the Right to the Highest Attainable Standard of Health, adopted in 2000 by the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. However, the principle must be more fully developed, integrated into UN human rights thinking and practice, and operationalized.
   
   
10. The human rights, environmental and sustainable development communities, including intergovernmental and governmental organizations and civil society, must each enlarge their view of their own area of concern to recognize and incorporate the others. As we learned in Vienna, human rights are indivisible, interdependent and interrelated. Like human life itself, none of these issue areas exists in a vacuum, and a holistic vision like Kofi Annan’s is necessary. Although progress has been made in achieving this awareness and integration in the past decade, more must be done.
    
    
11. The OHCHR should participate in the WSSD itself as well as in the preparatory process leading up to it, including the preparation of conference documents, to ensure that the human rights dimensions of environmental protection and sustainable development are prominent on the agenda for Johannesburg. This meeting is an encouraging example, but sustained and comprehensive follow-up is needed throughout the period leading to Johannesburg and beyond. The OHCHR and other UN bodies should ensure that human rights are integrated into the agenda of all UN conferences dealing with environmental and sustainable development issues and that environmental considerations are mainstreamed into meetings concerned with related human rights topics.
    
    
12. It is not necessary to create a new right to the environment, and it would not be a productive use of scarce time and other resources to attempt to do so. Existing human rights provide sufficient protection for both the environment and environmentalists. Civil and political rights are already being invoked effectively to protect environmental victims and advocates. Environmental activists like Ken Saro-Wiwa, Aleksandr Nikitin, Rodolfo Montiel and Teodoro Cabrera were victims of human rights violations at the hands of their governments, a fact that was clearly recognized by the numerous human rights and environmental organizations that campaigned on their behalf—successfully in three of these four cases. Advocacy on behalf of the environmental entails exercise of the human rights to freedom of expression, association, and assembly, as well as rights to information and participation. Environmental issues frequently involve competition over scarce resources, a scenario that often leads to human rights violations. Human rights mechanisms provide an effective set of tools to protect environmental activists and recognition of this has drawn a number of well-known international environmental organizations to human rights work, among them the Sierra Club and the Goldman Fund. At the local level, in poor and marginalized communities around the world, little or no distinction is made between what is an environmental and what is a human rights issue.
    
    
13. The same is true with respect to the substantive rights in the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, although more work is needed here. Most major human rights instruments predate the current awareness of the environment and therefore do not recognize specific environmental rights. Most of the major human rights treaties, however, contain provisions with obvious environmental dimensions. The ICESCR, for example, includes the following provisions:

Article 1: the right of "all peoples to freely dispose of their natural wealth and resources" and the prohibition against states’ depriving a people of its means of subsistence (This Article is also part of the ICCPR.).

Article 7: the right to safe and healthy working conditions;

Article 11: the right to an adequate standard of living, including adequate food and housing;

Article 12: the right to the highest attainable standard of health;

Article 15: the rights to enjoy the benefits of scientific progress and to intellectual property protection in the scientific and cultural fields. The latter is especially pertinent in the realm of indigenous knowledge systems and traditional ecological knowledge.

14. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights articulates the most broadly applicable substantive human rights with environmental dimensions, but these rights are also found in CEDAW and the CRC. In addition, CERD is concerned with issues of environmental justice and environmental racism. Within the environmental community, the connections to civil and political rights (see above) and to good governance (e.g., the Aarhus Convention) are already fairly well recognized, but a lot more work is needed on education and awareness concerning the environmental dimensions of economic, social and cultural rights.
    
    
15. The Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights should be a catalyst in promoting awareness of the intrinsic links between human rights and environmental protection and operationalizing them, in all areas of its work, including standard-setting, information-gathering, states parties’ reporting, monitoring and technical assistance. This process will be more effective and the outcomes more sustainable if it involves the participation of concerned individuals and organizations. The recent International Conference on Freshwater in Bonn incorporated such a multistakeholder dialogue. Because the OHCHR has a long history of collaboration with civil society, the foundation for such a dialogue already exists.
    
    
16. The long and fruitful international collaboration on the right to food can serve as a model for this work. As a result of sustained advocacy over many years by a dedicated group of people, and an active partnership among the OHCHR, FAO, and other UN organizations, governments, NGOs, academics and other civil society actors, remarkable progress has been made in defining, promoting and operationalizing the right to adequate food. The results so far have included a global summit (the 1996 World Food Summit in Rome, with Rome Plus Five coming up), and a General Comment, Draft Code of Conduct and three expert consultations on the human right to adequate food. The third expert consultation, which was held in March 2001 and hosted by the German government, was especially exciting because it went beyond the point where human rights work typically stops, to address issues of national-level implementation within a human rights framework. Represented at the table were several sustainable development organizations, among them UNICEF, whose work is grounded in a rights-based approach. An expert consultation would be a good way to begin to define what we mean by the environmental dimensions of human rights. In choosing a specific right on which to begin, the right to food is a logical candidate because of the conceptual foundation and working relationships already in place. Although the focus in the early stages will be on conceptual and normative development of the environmental dimensions of ESC rights, it is important to keep in mind that the ultimate goal is implementation.
    
    
17. It is worth noting that some groundwork in linking human rights and the environment within the UN has already been done. An early attempt to make connections between human rights and the environment in the UN system was the appointment in the early 1990s by the Sub-Commission on Prevention of Discrimination and Protection of Minorities, as it was then called, of a Special Rapporteur on human rights and the environment. In 1997 the Commission on Human Rights named the same individual a Special Rapporteur, with a narrower mandate: to study the "[a]dverse effects of the illicit movement and dumping of toxic and dangerous products and wastes on the enjoyment of human rights." In 1997 the Commission renewed her appointment for another three years. Other special rapporteurs should be appointed by the Commission and Sub-Commission to investigate and make recommendations concerning topics at the intersection of human rights and the environment. Existing mandates should be reviewed and expanded to incorporate the environmental dimensions of the topic where appropriate. Examples include the work of the special rapporteurs on the rights to food and housing. Adequate staff, logistical and financial support should be provided to the special rapporteurs by the OHCHR to enable them to fulfill their important missions.
    
    
18. General Comments and recommendations should be drafted and adopted on environment and human rights topics by the relevant treaty monitoring bodies. The logical starting point is the CESCR, because of the rights in the ICESCR with clear environmental dimensions, and the Committee on the Rights of the Child, because the CRC contains several explicit references to the environment. The CESCR could begin this process by organizing a day of general discussion at an upcoming session. Future General Comments on other topics should be reviewed during the drafting process by the concerned treaty monitoring body to determine whether they contain environmental dimensions that should be clarified. A good example is General Comment 14 on the right to the highest attainable standard of health, which includes provisions on water, sanitation, healthy workplace environments and other "underlying determinants of health." The treaty bodies should incorporate environmental concerns into their reviews of States parties’ reports as well as the guidelines they provide to States parties on preparing their reports.
    
    
19. The human rights community needs fully to accept and promote access to water as a human right. A right to water is not explicitly included in the ICESCR; nonetheless, the ICESCR certainly implies that water is a human right, and the right to water is stated explicitly in more recent human rights treaties, notably the 1989 Convention on the Rights of the Child (Art. 24.2.c). Access to water as a human right must be better acknowledged and conceptualized within the human rights field and accepted within the larger world community as well. The rights to life, food, and an adequate standard of living are meaningless without it. In this regard, the innovative work being done in South Africa to realize the constitutional right to access to water can serve as a model. Even in South Africa, though, access to water tends to be conceptualized fairly narrowly, corresponding primarily to provision of water. In addition to the quantity dimension, a meaningful right to water must also include water quality, equity, and sustainability, and it must be complemented by access to adequate sanitation.
    
    
20. The phenomenon of the increasing privatization and trade in water is relatively new and is still unfamiliar. The implications of treating a resource indispensable to sustaining life as a commodity to be sold to the highest bidder, rather than as part of the commonwealth of all living things, have not been addressed. The commodification of water resembles other dimensions of economic globalization that are increasingly recognized as human rights issues, including the patenting of life forms and indigenous knowledge, and the labor and environmental violations associated with free trade. It is important to investigate, evaluate and make recommendations concerning the human rights implications of the commodification, privatization and trade in water.
    
    
21. The human rights community has acknowledged the importance of sustainability, referring to it in terms of the rights of future generations. Human rights theorists and practitioners have not yet made sustainability an integral part of their thinking. The human rights community should accept this challenge, conceptualizing what sustainability means in human rights terms and how to achieve it. This will necessarily entail a dialogue with the environmental and sustainable development practitioners, who have made this concept central to their thinking and thought seriously about its implications.
    
    
22. The human rights community should also examine some of the other principles that are central to the thinking of environmentalists, such as the importance of conservation, the precautionary principle, taking an ecosystems approach, and acknowledging the interdependency of all life, conceptualizing what these principles mean in human rights terms.
    
    
23. Monitoring is one of the most effective tools available in the international system to assure accountability, and monitoring tools and methods are needed to assess the environmental components of existing human rights as well as the human rights dimensions of environmental programs. Different audiences have different needs in this area, and the monitoring tools need to be suited to their various uses. Governments, for example, have the obligation to respect, protect and fulfill human rights on a nondiscriminatory basis, and they must have the means to report on their compliance with the human rights treaties to which they are party, including satisfying the standard of progressive realization when appropriate. Individuals, communities, civil society organizations and regional and international human rights bodies must in turn be able to monitor the performance of governments. Appropriate monitoring tools for these various audiences will range from sophisticated data collection and statistics to simple and inexpensive tools to measure things like household water and air quality. Statistical information should be disaggregated to provide information on vulnerable groups within the population.
    
    
24. An important dimension of monitoring tools and methods for the environmental components of existing human rights and the human rights dimensions of environmental protection is development of indicators, benchmarks and protocols that are sensitive to human rights considerations. Identification and development of indicators is currently a priority within the human rights field. Work on indicators for human rights and the environment should be coordinated and consistent with these efforts.
    
    
25. Science and technology provide a link between human rights and the environment. Typically, environmental issues and solutions are scientifically based, and historically it has been by means of science and technology that scarce resources have been stretched to meet increasing demands. The Green Revolution is often cited as an example. It relied on science and technology (and a lot of water!) to produce more food to feed more people, and staved off the famine that was once predicted for the 1970s.
    
    
26. In the Report of the Secretary General on Implementing Agenda 21, science and capacity-building are presented as interlinked means of implementation for Agenda 21. Kofi Annan acknowledges the role of science in improving the quality of life for many, but cautions that "such developments have generally occurred independent of concerns for the conservation and wise management of the global biosphere" (para. 208). The Secretary General highlights the need for more scientific research on the connections between "ecosystem health and human health," especially in light of global climate change and the "fragmentation of landscapes," which is facilitating the spread of disease. We agree with the Secretary General’s recommendation concerning the importance of scientific research directed to advancing the realization of human rights in an environmentally sustainable way.
    
    
27. Science and technology are value-neutral. They can do great good, but scientific and technological advances can also contribute to environmental degradation and human rights violations and exacerbate chronic inequities in access to the benefits of scientific and technological progress. Inadequate disposal of toxic waste and pesticides, "terminator seed" technology, and development of pharmaceuticals that entail patenting of plants used by indigenous societies (often referred to as "biopiracy") are or have the potential to be examples of this. UN and regional human rights bodies, national governments, the business sector, the scientific community and civil society in general can play an important role in sponsoring, encouraging and carrying out scientific research directed to solving our more intractable environmental and human rights problems in a manner consistent with and respectful of the principles of human rights and environmental protection.