Перейти к основному содержанию

An Assessment of Access to Information, Public Participation and Access to Justice in Environmental Decision-Making in Asia-Pacific: Technical Briefing Paper prepared for Expert Meeting on Human Rights and the Environment

Страны
Мир
Источники
UNEP
Дата публикации
Происхождение
Просмотреть оригинал

INTRODUCTION

A. Background Human rights and the environment are intertwined; human rights cannot be enjoyed without a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment; and sustainable environmental governance cannot exist without the establishment of and respect for human rights.

Environmental rights are composed of substantive rights (fundamental rights) and procedural rights (necessary to achieve substantive rights). Substantive rights include rights to a safe climate, clean air, clean water and adequate sanitation, healthy and sustainably produced food, non-toxic environments in which to live, work, study and play, and healthy biodiversity and ecosystems. Procedural rights include three fundamental access rights: access to information , public participation , and access to justice . This background paper provides an assessment of these access rights in Asia and the Pacific.

Procedural rights find their legal foundation in Article 10 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development 1992 (the Rio Declaration). Principle 10 sets out three fundamental rights: access to information, access to public participation and access to justice, as key pillars of sound environmental governance. These rights are further developed in a number of instruments including the Guidelines for the Development of National Legislation on Access to Information, Public Participation and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Bali Guidelines) adopted by countries at the 11th Special Session of United Nations Environment Program’s (UNEP) Governing Council/ Global Ministerial Environmental Forum in Bali, Indonesia, in 2010.

These access rights are now increasingly reflected in many environmental laws at the national level .
Furthermore, some Constitutions of UN Economic and Social Commission for Asia and the Pacific (ESCAP) member states also include the right to a healthy and clean environment , such as Thailand, Indonesia and the Philippines. This is important as there is a positive link between a guarantee of environmental rights and improved environmental performance.

Two multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) which uphold procedural rights are the 1998 Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (‘Aarhus Convention’) based in Europe, and the 2018 Latin American and Caribbean Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Access to Justice in Environmental matters (‘Escazú Agreement’). MEAs such as the Aarhus Convention and the Escazú Agreement represent the result of global and regional consensus building around environmental matters and the defining of common goals to advance environmental rule of law and human rights based approaches to environmental decision-making.

These agreements align with UN General Assembly Resolution 53/144 on the Declaration on Human Rights Defenders and in particular Article 9 and Article 12 of the Declaration on States’ obligations to provide an enabling environment for the exercise and enforcement of human rights, and with various resolutions such as the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Declaration on the Environmental Rule of Law adopted by the IUCN World Congress on Environmental Rule of Law, which provides that environmental rule of law is premised on key governance elements including access rights.

The development of the Framework Principles on Human Rights and the Environment (the Framework Principles) by former UN Special Rapporteur on Human Rights and the Environment Professor John Knox have also advanced the discussion on the elements of the human right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment. The Framework Principles were presented to the UN Human Rights Council in March 2018 through Human Rights Council Resolution 37/59. As noted by Professor Knox, “the Framework Principles should be accepted as a reflection of actual or emerging international human rights law