From the Editors-in-Chief: The Right to a Safe, Clean, Healthy, and Sustainable Environment

Abstract

The discipline of international environmental law is about to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. We, at the Yearbook of International Environmental Law, have just celebrated our thirty years of contributing to the discipline of, and academic research on, the field. As already stated, in these three decades, we have watched environmental matters move slowly but emphatically towards the core of economic and social development and occupy an increasing portion of the political discourse, both at the international scene and on the domestic level. It seems incongruous in this context to celebrate the first panegyric declaration of a right to a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment, initially by the Human Rights Council in Resolution 48/13 (8 October 2021) and later by the UN General Assembly Resolution 76/300 (1 August 2022). One would have presumed that the impressive body of environmental regulation both at the international and national levels would have been safely constructed on a solid principle of law. Instead, reality has worked in the reverse order. Pau de Vilchez and Annalisa Savaresi have produced an impressive piece in which they delve into the specifics of its content with a view to ensuring the full enjoyment of the right. In addition, and perhaps even more important, they delineate and discuss the repercussions of its existence on the increasing use of litigation before domestic courts and international adjudicatory bodies in matters pertaining to climate change. In doing so, climate change moves away from the exclusive government-to-government domain of high politics and descends into the everyday relationship of citizen to state, with all the consequent emphasis on immediacy, effectiveness, and, ultimately, democratic accountability.