The European Court of Human Rights and the Major Arguments in Environmental Law

Abstract

The recognition of the right to a healthy environment is the result of a jurisprudential evolution which, without presupposing the explicit recognition of new rights, called for the extension of the scope of application of already existing rights (protection by ricochet, according to the established formula). In this context, the ECHR played and plays an important role in concretizing the right to a healthy environment, a right that indirectly imposes related implications to other rights that guarantee the essential right, namely the right to life of the natural person. Through its activity, the approach of the ECHR is an original one in that it resorts to hypothetical individual rights to sanction infringements of a collective good, such as the environment. This work is a summary that includes the arguments given by the ECHR for the right to a healthy environment, a right that can only be accessed by exploiting other rights such as: the right to life, the right to safety, etc. Although the right to a healthy environment is not a concept of the European Convention of Human Rights but a concept formed by the Council of Europe, however, the impacts on the environment cannot be directly caused by the violation of the right to a healthy environment, which is not guaranteed by the ECHR, can be, instead, the cause of the violation of other rights protected by the Convention.