Descriere - The European right to a healthy environment

There is, of course, a direct relation between the right to a healthy environment and other human rights. Environmental degradation affects the right to life, health, work and education. For example, the pollution of lakes and waters in a large number of countries has a severe impact on the fishermen’s possibility to make a decent living through their traditional work, or the pollution of the air and water resulted from the activity of certain plants generates health issues, while intoxications caused by lead-based paints, gas etc. affect the children’s capacity to learn.

The World Health Organization (WHO) defines the environment in relation with health, as being all the physical, chemical, and biological factors external to a person and all the related behaviours1. A healthy environment consists in the prevention or control of diseases, lesions and disabilities caused by the interactions between people and the environment.

The current legal regulation highlights the elaboration and enshrinement at national and international level of a fundamental human right to a healthy and balanced environment. The environment is considered healthy when it provides the adequate conditions of living and development to all the beings living at a certain point on Earth. Without a doubt, in order to be healthy, the environment must be ecologically balanced and preserved by any means and protected.

From the perspective of human rights, in the context of a severe environmental degradation, the right to a healthy environment gains an essential position, besides other rights, including the right to development, the right an adequate social environment by countering terrorism, criminality and drugs, the right to peace and security, the right to humanitarian assistance and observance of common humanity patrimony, rights with the generic name of collective solidarity third generation rights. The chronological categorization of human rights remains one of the best known forms of categorization.

Thus, there are first-generation human rights, represented by “classic” civil and political rights: the right to life, freedom, physical integrity, freedom of expression etc. The second-generation human rights are represented by the economic, social and cultural rights, which involve the positive intervention of the state, with the purpose of creating the material and social conditions for their exercise. The third-generation rights are represented by the collective, solidarity rights and, with the latest discoveries in medicine and biology the enshrinement of a fourth generation of human rights, which protect the human dignity from certain forms of abuse: genetic engineering, experiments on the human embryo, organ transplantation1.