Amnesty International and 216 civil society organisations, social movements and Indigenous Peoples Organizations co-signed a letter calling for the swift recognition of the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment through an additional Protocol to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms.
To the Ministers of Foreign Affairs and to the Permanent Representatives of the Member States of the Council of Europe
Excellencies,
We, civil society organizations, social movements, and Indigenous Peoples Organizations signing this letter call for the swift recognition of the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment through an additional Protocol to the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms. This demand reflects a core priority for children, youth and many other constituencies across the continent and is supported by a broad coalition of organizations working for human rights, environmental protection, gender equality, social inclusion, as well as trade unions and faith-based organizations.
The adverse impacts of the triple planetary crisis of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity loss can be felt by all people living in the Member States of the Council of Europe. Across the continent, more than 300,000 people die prematurely every year due to atmospheric pollution. The accelerating climate crisis fuels unprecedented heatwaves, prolonged droughts, repeated floods, sea-level rise, and disastrous wildfires that ravage communities and ecosystems. From the Mediterranean Sea to the Arctic Circle, entire ecosystems are collapsing and communities suffer from the consequences from the irreversible loss of biodiversity, affecting the supply of safe drinking water, contributing to poor air quality, threatening food security, decreasing the resilience of communities, and wiping out cultural practices. As a result, younger generations now grow up with new forms of anxiety. These crises exacerbate existing inequalities and most seriously affect the human rights of those already in marginalized situations.
In forty-two of the forty-six Council of Europe Member States, the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is already protected through national constitutions, legislation, court decisions, or as these States are Parties to the Aarhus Convention. The scale of the harms for people living in Europe, and the importance of coming to a unified approach in interpreting and implementing the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment makes it imperative for the Council of Europe to urgently take decisive steps toward the adoption of a binding legal framework that recognizes and protects the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.
The adoption of an additional Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights would provide the most powerful and impactful human rights-based response to the environmental crisis, filling a gap in human rights protection, leading to clarifying policies required and fostering accountability that is vital for the protection of present and future generations. It would reinforce and consolidate the legal protection of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment throughout Europe, further ensuring the enjoyment of all human rights. It would also equip governments on the continent with additional legal norms to defend their policies against encroachments and abusive judicial actions by corporate actors.
The right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment has been recognized by international and regional bodies. The UN Human Rights Council recognized this right through a resolution in October 2021, and the UN General Assembly followed suit in July 2022. Significantly, every individual Member State of the Council of Europe voted in favor of the UN General Assembly’s resolution. At the Reykjavik Summit of the Council of Europe, all Heads of State and of Government of the Council’s forty-six Members committed to “strengthening [their] work at the Council of Europe on the human rights aspects of the environment based on the political recognition of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment as a human right.” This human right is recognized in the main human rights treaties in other regions, most notably in the African Charter on Human and Peoples Rights, and in the 1988 Additional Protocol to the American Convention on Human Rights.
In light of the growing regional and global recognition of the right, we are convinced that an additional Protocol would reinforce existing obligations to respect, protect, and fulfill the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment. The Protocol would also inspire further and more progressive legislative and policy standards. It would encourage those Council of Europe Member States that have not yet legally recognized the right to affirm its recognition, promoting an equitable, shared responsibility among States in protecting a healthy environment.
The triple planetary crisis and the increasing impact of environmental degradation on human rights have led to an increase in related cases at the European Court of Human Rights, a trend that is expected to continue. While the Court has already affirmed States’ obligations to protect existing human rights — such as the right to life (article 2) and to private and family life (article 8) — against environmental hazards, thereby creating a growing body of environmental human rights case law1, an additional Protocol would consolidate the Court’s jurisprudence and make it more coherent,
contributing to greater legal certainty.
The explicit protection of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment under the European Convention of Human Rights would clarify States’ positive obligations to undertake protection measures and policies. This would contribute to averting human rights violations that affect the enjoyment of other rights such as not only those contained in the Convention including the rights to life, to private and family life, and the prohibition of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, but also other rights such health, food, water, and culture. The protection of this right is especially crucial for those who face the greatest risk of environmental harm, such as children, young people, women, Indigenous Peoples, national minorities, individuals living in poverty, persons living with disabilities, older persons, refugees and migrants, displaced people, and other disproportionately impacted groups.
Recognizing this overarching right would complement and reinforce the existing legal framework, affirming the fundamental importance of a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment to all aspects of human dignity, equality, and freedom. In line with the subsidiary nature of the Convention’s protection system, it would enable the Court to maintain its current line of environmental jurisprudence while providing an additional legal basis in cases involving States that ratify the additional Protocol.
Under a legally binding Protocol, the protection of the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment would send a powerful message both at national and international level, demonstrating and reaffirming Member States’ commitment to addressing the triple planetary crisis. It would also send an unequivocal message of solidarity to environmental and human rights defenders who currently pay a grave price for their advocacy.
Faced with unprecedented crises, the time is now for the Council of Europe to fulfill and reaffirm its mandate to promote democracy, the rule of law, and human rights in all Member States by recognizing and protecting the right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment through the adoption of a Protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights.
- See for instance, Manual On Human Rights And The Environment (3rd edition), Council of Europe, February 2022. ↩︎