Right Now OP-Ed: We need a right to a healthy environment, time for our government to act
The Federal Court of Australia has dismissed a landmark case brought by two Torres Strait community leaders. Uncle Pabai Pabai and Uncle Paul Kabai argued the Australian Government had a duty of care to protect the Torres Strait Islands from climate change, and that the government had breached that duty. In the wake of this decision, ALHR’s immediate past President, current Vice President and Chair of Children’s Rights, Kerry Weste co-authored an op-ed for Right Now Magazine with Professor Amy Maguire, Director of the Centre for Law and Social Justice at the University of Newcastle.
They argue that in the wake of the Federal Court’s decision, it’s time for the Albanese Government to walk its talk on protecting people from the climate crisis by legally protecting the right to a healthy environment.
Australia now finds itself a global outlier. More than 85 percent of UN Member States, 164 out of 193, have laws that expressly recognise the right to a healthy environment and 19 out of 27 EU countries have enshrined environmental rights protections in their constitutions. Although Australia supported an historic July 2023 United Nations General Assembly resolution recognising a stand-alone human right to a healthy environment, the Albanese Government has not followed through domestically.
Multiple human rights bodies, including the Human Rights Committee, the Committee on the Rights of the Child, the Committee on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, and the Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, have recognised that a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is essential for the full enjoyment of the human rights protected in core United Nations treaties. Australia is a party to these treaties and cannot continue to shirk its obligations toward current and future generations.
General Comment No. 26 from the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child holds governments and climate polluters around the world accountable for compromising the right of young people to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.
In a groundbreaking Australian first, in August 2024, the ACT explicitly enshrined the right to a healthy environment within its Human Rights Act 2004 (ACT). This nation-leading reform protects all Canberrans’ equal rights to a safe climate. It also secures their right to access environmental information, to meaningful and inclusive public involvement in environmental decision-making and access to justice.
In November 2023, Australian school students met in Newcastle at the second annual Centre for Law and Social Justice School Student Forum, supported by ALHR and the HRA4NSW Alliance. The focus of this forum was the right to a healthy environment and students in attendance collaboratively drafted and delivered a powerful statement to politicians and governments, calling for the protection of their right to a healthy environment.
Read the op-ed in full here