Environmental Dignity Rights Primer
New Frontiers in Environmental Constitutionalism (United Nations Environment Programme, May 2017)
Widener University Delaware Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series No. 17-08
14 Pages Posted: 20 Jun 2017
Date Written: May 2017
Abstract
The relationship between dignity rights and environmental rights is historically interesting, conceptually complex, and multi-dimensional in practice. Both of them attend to life on earth, which is as old as the world itself, and yet both areas of law have emerged only within living memory, to address matters that had been previously thought unamenable to regulation. And yet both types of rights have proliferated in constitutions around the world. Dignity rights emanated from the founding architecture of modern international human rights law while environmental rights grew out of the fusion of international environmental law and human rights law, now embodied largely in global constitutionalism. In the last few decades, both types of rights have become so prevalent in domestic constitutional texts that hardly a new constitution is promulgated without reference to one or both. As a result, both dignity rights and environmental rights have increasingly gained the attention of domestic constitutional courts, as well as regional human rights tribunals, where they have been interpreted and applied in a vast array of settings.
Keywords: Environmental Law, Dignity Rights, Environmental Rights
JEL Classification: K32
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation