THE NEED OF SUSTAINABLE ENVIRONMENT AS A HUMAN RIGHTS ISSUE

Environmental protection is a recent concept, developed in the international or regional human right protection systems or mechanisms. In those early days, especially when modern human rights protection mechanisms such as UDHR, ICCPR, IESCR and other human rights instruments adopted, the concern given to environmental protection was not that much significant . The only few provisions in these instruments recognizes some rights like the right to healthy and favorable condition of work, the right to get adequate food, clothing and shelter and the like. It was during in 1992, earth summit, that the relationship between human rights and sustainable environment is addressed. The need for the protection of environment becomes a necessity. In fact environment is a totality of human life; it means that it is sources of food, clothing, and shelter. The denial of environmental protection could bring about the denial of some fundamental rights such as the right to health, life, food and so on. It is true that, environment should be properly managed in order to make it favorable to human life. However; the effort to protect the environment faces different challenges like the issue of locus-standi, justifiability, conflict between developmental efforts and environmental protection, burden of proof, lack of cooperation among states and imbalance in the sharing of burden. This paper gives an overview of such challanges in light of various international instruments. Furthermore the paper gives suggestions for ensuring and protecting environmental rights or sustainable environment. In the present work cooperation among states in the world, integrated effort to protect the rights between different stakeholders, and equitable burden of shares in the overall environmental protection issues have been suggested for the attainment of the right in its practical sense.