The Right to a Healthy Environment in and Beyond the Anthropocene ed. by Hendrik Schoukens and Farah Bouquelle (review)

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Reviewed by:

• The Right to a Healthy Environment in and Beyond the Anthropocene ed. by Hendrik Schoukens and Farah Bouquelle
• Bradford C. Mank (bio)

Hendrik Schoukens & Farah Bouquelle eds., The Right to a Healthy Environment in and Beyond the Anthropocene (Edward Elgar Publishing 2024), ISBN 9781035300419, 380 pages; and the European Court of Human Rights’ Three Climate Change Decisions on April 9, 2024.

INTRODUCTION

The Right to a Healthy Environment in and Beyond the Anthropocene: A European Perspective, edited by Hendrik Schoukens and Farah Bouquelle, provides an excellent introduction to European law relating to climate change and whether there is a legal right in Europe to a healthy environment. There is an outstanding Introduction by Schoukens and Bouquelle that provides both an overview of the subject of judicial responses to climate change and the proposed right to a healthy environment for Europe, and a synopsis of each of the fifteen chapters in the book.¹ Schoukens and Bouquelle discuss the record setting heat affecting the world and Europe in the 2020s and the recognition that humans burning fossil fuels that release greenhouse gases (GHG) has so affected the Earth’s environment that we now live in the age of the Anthropocene.² Then the Introduction argues that a European focus on climate change and a right to a healthy environment is justified by the fact that nineteen out of twenty-seven European countries in the European Union have a right to a [End Page 555] healthy environment in their constitutions and seventeen in their national laws.³ Additionally, Europe has been a leader in recognizing individual human rights.⁴ Furthermore, an increasing number of European judicial decisions have either recognized either a legal right against climate change harms or a right to a healthy environment.⁵

Finally, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) might interpret the European Convention on Human Rights (hereinafter “the Convention” or ECHR) to recognize a right to a healthy environment or a right to a stable climate.⁶ Under either the right to life in Article 2 of the Convention, or, more frequently, in the right to respect for private and family life including their home in Article 8, the ECtHR in its decisions has gradually expanded environmental protections leading to a hope that it would recognize either a right to a healthy environment or a state duty to address climate change.⁷ The ECHR is important because it applies to the forty-six European nations that form the Council of Europe, including several nations such as Turkey that are not full members or members of the twenty-seven nations in the European Union.⁸

The Introduction and Chapter 1 by Meng Zhang explain that, on October 8, 2021, the United Nations (UN) Human Rights Council adopted Resolution 48/13, recognizing that a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is a human right.⁹ Then the UN General Assembly during the summer of 2022 declared in a resolution, with 161 votes in favor, and 8 abstentions, that access to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment is a universal human right.¹⁰ The Introduction and several individual chapters, especially Chapter 1, examine how these two [End Page 556] UN resolutions may affect national, international, and especially European law in addressing climate change litigation.¹¹

There is a growing trend for national courts in Europe to declare that their governments must fulfill their duty under climate change agreements, including the 2015 Paris Agreement, to limit future burning of fossil fuels and emissions of GHG; however, some European courts have recognized such a duty but determined that judicial mandates are inappropriate because traditional separation of powers principles (trias politica) mandate that climate change policies be made by elected governments rather than by judges.¹² Most notably, in 2019, the Dutch Supreme Court ordered the State of the Netherlands to comply with 2020 climate mandates and concluded that its order did not violate the principle of trias politica because the Court left the details of how to achieve the reductions to the Dutch government.¹³ By contrast, the Brussels Court of Instance in the Belgian case Klimaatzaak refused to issue a mandatory injunction against the Belgian government despite finding a...