The Human Right to a Healthy Environment

John H. Knox is Henry C. Lauerman Professor of International Law at Wake Forest University, North Carolina, he has written extensively on human rights and environmental issues. The first UN special rapporteur on human rights and the environment, he has led the effort to understand and promote the application of human rights to environmental issues. He won the Francis Deák Prize for scholarship in 2003. Between 1999 and 2005, he chaired a national advisory committee to the US Environmental Protection Agency, and from 2008 to 2012 he was of counsel to the Center for International Environmental Law. Ramin Pejan is a staff attorney at Earthjustice's International Program, based in San Francisco. He is also an adjunct clinical professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, in its International Justice Clinic. Prior to Earthjustice, Ramin worked for the United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights and the United Nations Environment Programme on the links between human rights and environmental issues. From 2010 to 2012, Ramin worked in Bushbuckridge, South Africa, as legal counsel for the Association for Water and Rural Development, a non-profit organization focusing on water resource management issues in rural South Africa.

• 1. Introduction John H. Knox and Ramin Pejan; 2. Catalyst for change: evaluating forty years of experience in implementing the right to a healthy environment David R. Boyd; 3. Learning from constitutional environment rights Erin Daly and James R. May; 4. The right to a satisfactory, healthy and sustainable environment in the African regional human rights system Lilian Chenwi; 5. The European Court of Human Rights and international environmental law Ole W. Pedersen; 6. Complexities and uncertainties in matters of human rights and the environment: identifying the judicial role Dinah Shelton; 7. Reasoning up: environmental rights as customary international law Rebecca M. Bratspies; 8. In search of a right to a healthy environment in international law: jus cogens norms Louis J. Kotzé; 9. A human right to a healthy environment? Moral, legal and empirical considerations César Rodríguez-Garavito; 10. Quality control of the right to a healthy environment Marcos Orellana; 11. The Malé formulation of the overarching environmental human right Daniel Magraw and Kristina Wienhöfer; 12. The politics of human rights, the environment, and climate change at the human rights council: towards a universal right to a healthy environment? Marc Limon; 13. Human rights in the climate change regime: from Rio to Paris and beyond Lavanya Rajamani; 14. The right to a healthy environment and climate change: mismatch or harmony? Sumudu Atapattu.

'In assembling this collection of essays, John H. Knox and Ramin Pejan have sought to deliver 'a continuing conversation on the relationship between human rights and the environment'. They have succeeded admirably in generating a wide-ranging and diverse debate about a topic which loses none of its relevance in a world where climate change and global environmental destruction threaten the future of humanity itself.' Alan Boyle, Edinburgh University