Children’s Rights and the Environment

Abstract

This chapter offers critical analysis on the normative basis for articulating children’s environment-related rights as well as the key pathways to expanding the core content and scope for such rights. Recognizing that a healthy environment is a prerequisite to the enjoyment of all rights, it is crucial to focus attention on the environmental dimensions of children’s rights so that the role that children’s rights frameworks can play in managing environmental quality is strengthened. The Convention on the Rights of the Child offers an excellent normative basis for reinforcing our understanding and approaches to children’s environment-related rights because it already contains provisions that make explicit reference to the environment and many others that have strong environmental dimensions. Beyond these normative prescriptions, it is critical to engage with the Convention’s monitoring and enforcement mechanisms, particularly those presided over by the Committee on the Rights of the Child, with a view towards achieving a more systematic and coherent treatment of the environmental dimensions of certain children’s rights. Such an approach, it is argued, will likely result in better articulation of the relationship between children’s rights and the environment and could form the basis for the definition of a children’s right to a healthy environment at international law.