On the eve of World Environment Day, I joined around 400 environmental defenders and policymakers from across Europe in Strasbourg, France, where they gathered at the first European Forum on Environmental Human Rights Defenders. As Karin Kvarfordt Niia, a reindeer herder from Sweden’s Sami community, discussed how mining projects have displaced Sami people from their lands, she noted: “Defenders who raise their voices are portrayed as obstacles.”
Europe has been a perhaps surprisingly hostile environment for climate activists, and defenders feel keenly that the lack of a regional human rights instrument explicitly recognizing the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment contributes to it. Neither the European Convention on Human Rights nor the European Social Charter, the Council of Europe’s leading rights treaties, explicitly includes the right.
Without a specific treaty in which to anchor their advocacy, states and companies more easily dismiss defenders' work as unjustified obstruction: lowering the costs of targeting them and sometimes depriving them of standing in court. If the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment was enshrined in the Convention, defenders would have access to the European Court of Human Rights giving them the opportunity to demonstrate which actions and omissions are violating the right to a healthy environment, and seek a concrete, binding legal remedy from the court.
The conditions for Europe to do what is needed have never been more favorable. The International Court of Justice's Advisory Opinion on climate change recognized the right to a healthy environment as a precondition for the enjoyment of all other human rights. Building on the UN General Assembly’s 2022 recognition of the right as universal, last month’s General Assembly resolution welcoming that Opinion shows growing global momentum.
African and Inter-American human rights systems have recognized the right to a healthy environment for decades and the Council of Europe’s own Parliamentary Assembly has already set in motion a process to draft the necessary instrument.
Environmental defenders across Europe currently operate in a fragmented landscape of uneven national protections and inconsistent international standards. The member states in the Council of Europe need to take this long overdue step urgently: Europe needs an instrument explicitly recognizing the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment.
