December 14, 2009, Amsterdam, The Netherlands – IOS Press announces the publication of a special excerpt of Environmental Policy and Law. This unique excerpt calls attention to the important topic of human rights and the environment.
The fact that governments will meet in Copenhagen in December 2009 at the 15th Conference of the Parties (COP-15) for negotiations under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) has rendered the discussions on human rights and the environment in the context of law and policy both relevant and timely. Up to now, the area has suffered from a lack of clear and consistent thinking, according to a special issue of Environmental Policy and Law (volume 39, issue 6).
"The adoption of the Tehran Declaration on Human Rights and the Environment 2009 will, it is hoped, encourage representatives of the Parties at Copenhagen to give significant emphasis and importance to the human rights and environmental nexus during their negotiations," say Janet Blake and Ben Boer in the issue.
The International Conference on Human Rights and the Environment took place in Tehran in May 2009 and resulted in a document, entitled the Tehran Declaration on Human Rights and the Environment. The conference was conceived initially as a forum for some leading international experts in the field to further explore the question of human rights and the environment in the context of law and policy, and has shown that concerns about the environment are not, as much legal literature in the field would suggest, confined to the developed countries of the 'West', but are shared across cultures and countries at different levels of development.
The relationship between human societies and the physical environment is seen as a complex one built up over millennia of mutual impacts and interactions. This, then, suggests that environmental protection extends beyond the regulation of human activities, management and conservation to encouraging those cultural practices and ways of life of human societies that are generally beneficial to the environment thus introducing a human rights dimension to environmental protection.
Source: IOS Press