The Fundamental Right to a Healthy and Ecologically Harmonious Environment

• Author: Liliana Niculescu
• Pages: 78-87

European Integration - Realities and Perspectives. Proceedings 2018

78

The Fundamental Right to a Healthy and Ecologically Harmonious

Environment

Liliana Niculescu1

Abstract: The right to a healty enviroment i s a fundamental right of very person in a state. It is absolutely

natural for each person to demand/to live in a healty and unpolluted enviroment. The fight for the prevention

of pollution and the elimination of its consequences should be a duty of every citizen of state. The

establishing by law of numerous obligations to protect the enviroment, both by state and private companies

does not diminish the importance of the moral and legal obligation of every citizen to protect the enviroment.

The state recognise the right of every person to a healthy and ecologically balanced enviroment, providing the

legal framework for exerting this right. The constitutional recognition of such a right is important for the

economy, for enviromental legislation and for the enviromental protection/policy in general.

Keywords: enviroment; enviromental protection; pollution; healthy enviroment; ecologically balanced

1. Introduction

1.1. Preliminaries

Out of the corpus of fundamental rights and freedoms of men, that are internationally acknowledged

and also by over-national institutions, the right to a healthy and ecologically harmonious environment

represents the dynamic transposing of the superior interest of our generation into a general juridical

and objective norm of law meant to “ensure an acceptable environment even at the global level, that

encourages the development2 of all the people in the world.

By acknowledging and admitting the fact that the right to a healthy environment represents a

fundamental right, crowned with the more and more frequent Constitutional establishment, allows us

to hope for the surpassing of the procedural and jurisprudential limits of the sphere of the respective

right in order to also ensure it by some expressly given directive within the European Convention in

order to protect the fundamental rights and freedoms of men. A fortiori the passing through this first

stage – the legislative establishment will determine the national legislator to establish new duties

meant to ensure the proper juridical context that would turn this right to advantage.

It was firstly internationally proclaimed at the First World Conference of the United Nations regarding

the environment (Stockholm, June 1972) and adopted at the level of the states, and there is a certain

difference between the national and the international legislation, the communitarian one. This

difference appears because of the difficulties in effectively and materially ensuring this right and the

1 Assistant Professor, PhD, Dunarea de Jos University of Galaţi, The Facult y of Juri dical, Social, and Political Sciences,

Romania. Address: 47 Domneasca Street, Tel.: 0040 0336 130 108, Romania, E-mail: liliana.niculescu@ugal.ro.

2 The African Charta of the rights of men and the peoples, 1981, art. 24.