About the project

Project title: 
Human right to environment in national law: advanced theory, poor practice?
 
Project duration: 
2014 – 2016
 
 
Project objectives:
The project supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic is focused on analysing the substantive human right to environment, which is an emerging legal instrument aimed at the environmental protection. Firstly, the project aims to explore theoretical foundations of the right, including the description and evaluation of the previous development of the linkages between the environmental protection and human rights, and the philosophical basis of the right. Secondly, the project targets the national constitutional implementation of the right to environment in selected European countries. The investigation will be led especially to answer the question what the prerequisites are for practical enforcement of the right, and to identify the main legislative and interpretative factors helping to its successful litigation in courts. The conclusions of the project address both international academic debate on the topic of environmental rights and the failed situation of applying the constitutional right to a favourable environment in the Czech Republic. 

Plan of the project:
The first part of the 3-years project is aimed to study the theoretical aspects of the interlinkages between the human rights and the environment, within the context of the modern development of human rights. In this part of the project, the investigator will try to answer the questions whether and how the human rights (as a form) may be filled with an environmental content, in order to help to protect the environment. Not only the human environment is meant here, but also those parts of the environment that are not directly interconnected with human life. The investigator will also research the new approaches to the role of humans in the global ecosystem (such as ecocentrism, biocentrism, rights of nature, etc.). The main focus will be kept in the theoretical aspects of recognizing a substantive human right related to the environment. The investigator will present all these topics in an e-book in Czech, to Czech readers, because these issues have not been dealt much in the Czech legal writing so far. She will cover also the most recent developments of the environmental rights that can be described as a fragmentation of the right to environment into several rights related to certain parts of the environment, such as the right to water, or much efforts to solve the climatic changes using the instruments of human rights. 

Parallelly, the other part of the project, the comparative one, will be treated. The aim of this part of the project is to analyze the real application of the right to environment in practice, in the sphere of national law. To that purpose, a group of European countries was selected where the right to environment has been litigated in courts, covering Belgium, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain. The application of the right will be studied using not only the academic writings in the field but also the relevant judicial decisions. In this part, a special attention will be paid to interpretative principles and tools that enabled or helped the constitutional court to be applied. Such an approach, emphasizing the role of interpretation, can be fruitful for the Czech environment as well, as an inspiration. The results of the comparative part of the project will be presented in a book in Czech.

Finally, the conclusions of both parts of the project will be introduced in an article in English, expected in 2016/17.





Grant project of the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic No. 14-32244S "Human right to environment in national law: advanced theory, poor practice?"