Sustainable Development: The Human Rights Approach to Environmental Protection in South Africa

Abstract

International and domestic environmental law has evolved quite rapidly in the last few decades. At the international level the Stockholm and Rio Declarations paved the way for a broad based consensus of the international community on environmental issues and principles. At the domestic level many states have also incorporated environmental protection in their constitutions and even more states are doing the same, at least in their domestic legislation. In this process of evolution, environmental law has unleashed a number of novel principles such as: the participatory principle, the polluter pays principle, the precautionary principle, the inter-generational and intra-generational principles, the prevention principle, the sustainable development principle and so on.