Introduction to environmental rights Introduction to environmental rights

Resumen

This article presents a revised version of a part of the researches carried out by Massimiliano Bin for his graduation tesis, under the supervision of Riccardo Perona, that included an academic stay at the University of Cartagena in May 2022.
 

The thesis focused on the Andean constitutional approach to environmental protection and legal subjectivity and required a preliminary study regarding the very notion of environmental rights, going through its history and development in the Western legal thinking. This article focuses on this specific issue.
 

When it comes to designing and enacting legal tools, whether hard or soft ones, in order to keep the environment safe, it must be said that human enjoyment of the environment has always played a huge role in the Western doctrine, despite the possibility for a dialogue on the fairly recent idea of protecting the environment for its own sake to taking place. As a matter of fact, these two conceptual approaches somehow diverge as well as they complement each other. However, in order to properly address this issue, the emergence of environmental law itself has to be considered.

In this sense, firstly, some insights into the history of environmental rights within the context of Western legal tradition will be presented (§ 2), henceforth their position in the general taxonomy of rights and within the human rights discourse will be addressed (§ 3).