The Right to a Healthy Environment: Beyond Twentieth Century Conceptions of Rights

The lengthy process culminating in the UN General Assembly's recognition of the right to a healthy environment provides important insights into the nature of today's international human rights regime. In particular, it shows that human rights have moved well beyond the impoverished conceptions of rights that dominated the second part of the last century, that new norms develop in ways that are more complex and flexible than traditional doctrinal accounts would suggest, and that today's process of norm generation involves a wide and diverse array of actors, with states sometimes struggling to keep up.