A Child-Centred Approach Between the Lines of International and EU Environmental Law

Abstract

ChildrenChildren are rarely explicitly articulated as environmental rights holders and beneficiaries per se in international and EU environmental law. However, this does not mean—as this chapter will reveal—that, not only the current legal international environmental frameworks arguably tend to be adult-centric and fail to provide international standards (and very few national ones) on the environmental rights of the child per se, a child-centred approachChild-centred approach to the environmentEnvironment cannot (but should) be discerned on account of his/her vulnerability to environmental impacts on their physical and mental healthHealth. In parallel to the CRC, because of the ‘at riskRisk’ nature of childrenChildren and infants, between the lines, a child-centred approachChild-centred approach is also perceptible and is justified in international and EU environmental law so that much of the multilateral legislation designed to address environmental issues ought to benefit the child as a distinct recipient. In this chapter it will be shown that ‘ChildrenChildren have rights because they have interests that are sufficiently important to impose duties on others’ not only from a theoretical perspective but also looking more closely at the formulation of international and EU environmental law which indirectly recognise childrenChildren as rights holders of procedural environmental rights: From another standpoint, an image of childrenChildren as resources to be used to achieve sustainableSustainable development developmentDevelopment and, relatedly, as a proxyProxy for future generationsGenerationsfuture is also discernible examining international and EU environmental law though with different extents.