Upholding the Right to Healthy Environment through Judicial Interpretation of the Right to Life

Abstrak

The late twentieth century identified a significant rise in legal claims intersecting human rights and environmental protection, a connection that became evident following the Stockholm Conference of 1972. This conference established the foundational link between environmental conservation and the realization of human rights as outlined in national and international legal frameworks. It became apparent that environmental pollution could compromise protected rights such as the right to life, the right to peaceful enjoyment of property, and the right to privacy, among others. Consequently, efforts to safeguard the environment inherently supported the realization of fundamental human rights. Human rights thus increasingly served as a legal tool for environmental protection through judicial interpretation and the expansion of existing human rights provisions. This paper focused specifically on the concept of the right to life, addressing two key questions: the extent to which courts were willing to adopt a broad interpretation of the right to life for environmental protection, and whether courts were expanding traditional human rights principles. The paper examined case law to evaluate the application of the right to life in environmental protection, using a doctrinal legal research method that involved issue-based analysis and conceptual clarification tailored to the research’s objectives.