Analysis Of The Rights To Environment From The Perspective Of Fundamental Human Rights And The Legal Responses

The rights to environment have always been an important and controversial theory in the fields of environmental laws and human rights laws. It's necessary to recognize the rights to environment as fundamental human rights by analyzing the emergence, definition, contents and the nature of these rights. The purpose of this analysis is to recognize these rights in the relative laws and to offer some suggestions about how to protect these newly born rights. The background of these rights is that the human beings are facing worse and worse environmental problems; the development and advancement of human rights theories have provide these rights with theoretical support; environmental ethics have provided these new rights with ethical support. Because of the existence of these supports, the rights to environment firstly came into being in the western countries. What's more, the rights to environment have gained wide support. Scholars have been studying the rights to environment since the emergence of these rights and they have made great achievements in this field. But there are also some problems in the studies of these scholars and the most prominent one is that more and more subjects are included. When studying these new rights from the perspective of fundamental human rights, we can easily find that the so-called rights to environment should be people's rights instead of animals'rights or nature's rights. Even though the current theories about the rights to environment have covered almost every aspect of the content of these rights, they are not so reasonable and persuasive. In fact, the rights to environment can be generally divided into two categories: substantive and procedural rights. Scholars have not come to an agreement when talking about human rights but they have formed some common sense about the nature and characteristics of human rights and fundamental human rights. After studying the nature of human rights, fundamental human rights and the rights to environment, we can easily find that the rights to environment are bound to meet all the requirements of fundamental human rights: these rights are indispensable; these rights are irreplaceable; these rights are untransferable; these rights are stable; these rights are able to produce other rights; these rights are similar in the civilized modern countries. Apart from the theoretical analysis of the rights to environment, the supporting evidence of these rights can be easily found in the related articles of international laws, regional laws and national laws. In this part the author firstly discusses the significance of people's rights to environment when they are classified as fundamental human rights. As a developing country, China is also facing serious environmental problems. So it is significant to confirm the nature of these new rights from the perspective of fundamental human rights. In order to effectively protect people's rights to environment, the author also offers some proposals for China's legislative responses. Besides strengthening the state duty and state responsibility, the constitution should clearly include people's rights to environment as fundamental human rights. Then the civil laws, environmental regulations and remedial laws should also include some necessary articles to safeguard these newly born rights.