When Environmental Protection and Human Rights Collide: The Politics of Conflict Management by Regional Courts

A role for human rights in the protection of the environment has become a widely accepted concept and reflects our increasing awareness of the reliance of individuals upon both their local and global environments.1 Challenging the validity of this connection—highlighting that it ignores inherent conflicts between environmental exploitation and protection and individual human rights protection—is therefore a brave and undoubtedly contested proposition. This proposition is one from which MarieCatherine Petersmann has not shied away. When Environmental Protection and Human Rights Collide addresses the presumption that human rights and environmental protection are comfortable bedfellows and that their aims are unquestionably aligned. Petersmann critiques this position by revealing the complex strategies used by regional courts to adjudicate and mediate the conflicts between these two fields in order for the two to co-exist in case law. There is certainly scholarship that addresses the inherent anthropocentrism of framing environmental protection as a human rights issue,2 and voluminous work extolling the virtues of this approach and its utility broadly or in specific case studies.3 Despite this, few would deny the benefits of capitalising on any gains in environmental protection that could be achieved through the application of human rights law. Petersmann ably addresses a gap in the literature regarding how we have reached the point at which this is accepted as an ostensibly comfortable interplay between two fields of law that, although seemingly aligned, in fact often collide. In Chapter 1, Petersmann traces the progression from legal protection of the environment. First this maps the move from law being focused upon preserving a ‘pristine wilderness’ to a ‘human environment’ and then also from a disconnected pair of legal fields, human rights and environmental law, to a point of integration between the two. This culminates in Petersmann identifying the ways in which this synergy between human rights and environmental protection has been most commonly framed. She argues that there exists a spectrum of anthropocentrism upon which these framings exist (p 55). This spectrum allows for focus upon the interplay of economic concerns, the ecosystem, conservation, and human health. Thus, Petersmann incorporates varied and sometimes conflicting aims, in spite of a perceived overarching synergy between environmental protection and human rights. The chapter effectively outlines the inherent conflicts upon which the arguments in the rest of the book are based.