No less than seven reports will be devoted to the environment and climate change during the plenary session of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg this week. The most important of these was entrusted to the Belgian Simon Moutquin (Ecolo) and is entitled ‘Anchoring the right to a healthy environment: the need for enhanced Council of Europe action’.
Together with a Resolution and a Recommendation, this text calls for the creation of “new legal instruments enshrining the right to a healthy environment” at the pan-European level. Clearly, the establishment of an additional ‘human rights and environment’ Protocol to both the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Social Charter, flagship instruments of the Council of Europe.
“There is an urgency”, the rapporteur told EUROPE on Monday 27 September. “At a time when the interdependence between human rights and climate change is becoming more and more obvious, it is crazy to see that the Council of Europe - a forerunner in the defence of fundamental rights - is lagging behind on the issue”.
The African Charter and the American Court of Human Rights include the environmental dimension, no less than 32 of the 47 member states of the Council of Europe have included it in their constitutions, but the Council of Europe is at a standstill.
“A first Recommendation was sent by the Parliamentary Assembly to the Committee of Ministers, but it remained unanswered”, regretted Mr Moutquin. However, he felt that “since then, there has been a global awareness”. “The time has come to anchor new rights in the European legal arsenal”, he said.
These new rights are called “third generation” and must be articulated on the “first generation” civil and political rights defined in the European Convention on Human Rights and the “second generation” rights defended by the European Social Charter with a socio-economic scope.
The report, resolution and recommendation will be voted on Wednesday 29 September after a debate in the morning and before a high-level panel discussion with Robert Spano, President of the European Court of Human Rights and Antonio Guterres, UN Secretary General.
If adopted - and the Rapporteur believes that they will be - the Resolution and Recommendation call for the establishment of legal mechanisms to enshrine the intergenerational dimension of the right to a safe, healthy and sustainable environment and the prevalence of nature protection in cases of scientific doubt. (Original version in French by Véronique Leblanc)