A human right perspective directly addresses environmental impacts on the life, health, private life and property of individual homes rather than on the environment in general. It may serve to secure measures to control pollutions affecting health and private life.
It is self-evident that in so far as we are concerned with the environmental dimensions of rights found in avowedly human rights treaties - the ICCPR, AFCHPR—then we are talking about a “greening” of existing human rights law rather than the addition of new rights to existing treatise.
The main focus of environmental right as a separate human right has thus been the rights to life, private life, health, water and property. Some of the main human rights treatise also has specifically environmental provisions, with the possible exception of ICCPR17.
However, it does not make sense to engage human rights language to combat environmental degradation only when such degradation affects the rights to life, property and the privacy of certain directly affected individuals.
This reductionist use of human rights may even be counter-productive in that it tends to reduce environmental values to the very limited sphere of individuals interest, thus adulterating their inherent nature of public goods indispensable for the life and welfare of security as a whole.
This does not mean that human rights approach to environmental protection considered above should be discontinued. On the contrary, a more imaginative and courageous jurisprudence which takes into consideration the collective dimension of human rights affected by environmental degradation should be welcomed and also it should adopt the language and technique of human right discourse to the enhanced risk posed by global environmental crisis to society and, indeed, to humanity as a whole18.
This first formulation which deems environmental rights as novel separate human rights can be explicitly understood with the example of Article 11 of the San Salvdor protocol to the American Convention on human rights which stipulates that “everyone shall have the right to live in a healthy environment and to have access to basic public services”
In the environmental human rights arena, scholars have proposed the following three different concepts namely.
• Environmental right as separate human rights.
• Environmental rights within established human rights.
• Environmental rights as right of environment.
ENVIRONMENTAL RIGHTS WITHIN ESTABLISHED HUMAN RIGHTS
There are two basic conceptions of environmental human rights in the current human rights system. The first is that the right to a healthy or adequate environment is itself a human right; as seen in Article 24 of the African chapter on human and people rights which stipulates that all persons shall have a right to a generally satisfactory environment.
The second conception is the idea that environmental human rights can be derived from other rights usually the right to life, the right to health, the right to private family life and the right to property.(among many others). This second theory enjoys much more widespread use in human rights courts as they are contained in many human rights documents.
This second formulation conceives of environmental rights as embedded within human rights already in existence such as right to life or property. For instance, Nigeria was found to have violated the Ogoni people’s right to life and health when it acquiesced to unrestrained environmental destruction to occur, thereby devastating the Ogoni’s health19.
Under the African system, the African commission took a landmark decision in 2001 with regard to the right to a clean environment. In a case where it was alleged that the Nigerian government had contributed to gross violations of human rights through the actions of its military forces and unsound environmental management related to exploitation of the Niger delta, the commission found that the Nigerian government had violated, inter alia the right to a clean environment by directly contaminating water, soil and air, which harmed the health of the Ogoni people living in the area, and by failing to protect the community from harm caused by the oil companies. The duty to respect the right to a clean environment largely entails non-interventionist conduct from the state, such as refraining from carrying out, sponsoring or tolerating any practice, policy or legal measures violating the integrity of the individual.
The commission stated that compliance with the right to a clean environment must include undertaking or at least permitting independent scientific monitoring of the threatened environment, and requiring and publicizing environmental and social impact studies prior to any major industrial development.
This right also requires that appropriate monitoring is undertaken, information is disseminated to the communities exposed to hazardous materials, and that meaningful opportunities are guaranteed for individuals to be heard and to participate in development decisions affecting their communities. The Nigerian government, it was held, had discharged none of these obligations. 20.