This introduction lays out the context, scope, theoretical framework, core arguments and structure of the study. It problematises the focus on synergies between environmental protection and human rights in existing literature, and emphasises the importance of retrieving, exploring and critically unpacking the conflicts that underpin this relationship. The analysis introduces the central interrogation of the book: how environmental protection laws can collide with human rights concerns, and how regional human rights courts balance individual or collective human rights against the interest in environmental protection, when environmental protection and human rights collide. Several sub-questions unfold from this main interrogation. How do regional human rights courts address, conceive of and frame conflicts with environmental laws, many of which include considerations that are part and parcel of existing human rights? Which conflict-management techniques and argumentative strategies do they employ to settle such trade-offs? And what does this tell us about how the environment is represented, and how its protection is legally justified in relation to human concerns? The summary of the main findings of the book lay bare the importance of the project, the gaps it aims to fill, and how these novel insights reconfigure the relationship between environmental protection and human rights.

This first part explores the origins of the relationship between environmentalism and human rights and traces the evolution of this encounter through a historical lens. It analyses how concerns for environmental protection and human rights emerged as distinct aspirations that progressively evolved towards mutual integration into each other’s normative architecture, legal registers and institutional practices. By examining how the framing of the relationship between ‘Man and Nature’ changed over time and how these changes of perception were legally translated in international instruments, judicial decisions and doctrinal accounts, this part of the book thereby sheds light on a major paradigm shift that occurred in the 1960s, when environmental protection began to be framed as intrinsically intertwined with human rights concerns. This shift corresponds to the first explicit references to human rights in environmental instruments. The analysis unpacks how this radical turn in environmentalism was accommodated at three complementary levels: legislative, adjudicative and doctrinal. This produced a dominant account where environmental protection and human rights are viewed as synergistic and mutually reinforcing objectives, in disregard of the conflicts that also underpin this relation. This account thereby contributes to the literature that critically engages with liberal human rights-based approaches to environmental protection.

To counter the dominant anthropocentric and synergistic framing of the relationship between environmental protection and human rights, this chapter focuses on the conflicting dimension of this relation. It maps the main types of conflicts induced from a case-law analysis of regional human rights courts. Conflicts between nature conservation policies (through the creation of protected areas) and the rights of indigenous peoples or cultural minorities living on such lands have been deplored for long, as also instantiated through the numerous cases decided by the Inter-American and African human rights Courts and Commissions. Less has been said, however, about conflicts between animal welfare concerns and cultural or religious freedoms of certain communities; conflicts between landscape preservation policies and land ownership, including by vulnerable groups such as Roma people; and conflicts between energy policies and the rights to adequate living conditions and to property. Strasbourg and Luxembourg judges are increasingly occupied with such issues. This innovative typology of normative conflicts between environmental protection laws and human rights offers new empirical, theoretical and doctrinal insights to understand the nature and the extent of the conflicting dimension of the relationship between environmental protection and human rights.

A vast literature on the legislative alignment between environmental and human rights concerns has flourished since the 1960s. This literature has mostly been occupied with the negative impacts that environmental harms and pollution have on human rights. The scholarly engagement with environmental and human rights protection gave rise to new fields of literature commonly referred to as ‘human rights approaches to environmental protection’ or ‘environmental human rights law’, thereby instantiating the normative quasi subsumption of environmental and human rights protection. This contributed to advancing both the agenda of environmental and human rights protection as well as their ever-closer intertwinement, and reinforced the mainstream anthropocentric and synergistic framing of their relationship. Yet, these two characteristics have also been contested. While much ink has been spilled on critiquing the lingering anthropocentrism that underpins a human rights law-based approach to environmental protection, less attention has been paid to the problematic emphasis on synergies that take the mutually beneficial linkages between environmental and human rights protection for granted. The analysis maps these different strands of inquiry and critique against human exceptionalism and the ideal of frictionless compatibility between environmental protection and human rights, and identifies how the book contributes to these debates.

This chapter turns to the second ‘universalisation strategy’ developed by courts to conceal legal indeterminacy when environmental protection and human rights collide. It shows how courts rely on the authority and supposed objectivity of experts when interpreting conflicts and justifying their decisions. The argument unfolds in two parts. The first part analyses the role played by scientific experts in cases decided by the Court of Justice of the European Union. It critically assesses this expert-based managerial approach to conflict adjudication and highlights the risk of obstructing the protection of certain rights that do not fit a particular epistemic framework. The second part analyses the role played by specialised human rights experts in regional human rights courts in cases concerning Indigenous peoples and cultural minorities. A network of experts with particular institutional ties gets involved in such cases. These experts share a specific (legal) vocabulary and imaginary when speaking on behalf of the applicants, which courts replicate through cross-jurisdictional and cross-cultural referencing. This essentialises certain ways of living determined by artificial binaries of ‘traditional’ versus ‘modern’. What emerges is an empirically rich understanding of regional human rights courts’ reliance on specialised expertise with both bright and dark sides.

Environmental and human rights law emerged as autonomous and disconnected bodies of law with distinct normative underpinnings. Yet, these progressively evolved towards increasing normative interconnections and legal integration. This chapter historicises this evolution by retracing how concerns for environmental protection were legally framed in early environmental instruments and to what end. It then shows how these representations of environmental protection changed over time once they started being articulated in relation to human rights considerations. The analysis draws on early legislative instruments in environmental and human rights law and retrieves the competing rationales at stake in their negotiations, the diplomatic tensions that underpinned their adoptions, and the political and epistemic compromises that were struck to accommodate divergent views over environmental protection and socio-economic development embedded in broader post-colonial debates. The mainstream narrative of environmental protection as translated in modern environmental law is then problematised by demonstrating how specific concerns were accommodated while others were silenced, discarded or neglected. A dominant anthropocentric and synergistic frame emerged, which defines environmental protection as inherently beneficial to human rights. This led to a narrow focus on synergies between environmental and human rights protection, with scant attention paid to conflicts and trade-offs, as the chapter demonstrates.

This concluding chapter summarises the main arguments and findings of the book. It reflects on the multiple rationales and ideals that were mobilised over time to protect the environment, and translates this protection into an actionable legal framework. It examines the motivations and aims invoked to this end and explores what implications the gradual association of environmental protection with human rights in regional human rights jurisprudence had for the representation of the environment and its relation to human concerns. How are environmental concerns conceptualised, consolidated and contested by human rights courts? Which representations of human and non-human relations lie encoded in the ‘universalisation strategies’ that the book reveals? And what are the political effects of the adoption of environmental concerns in the lexicon of human rights? The conclusion interrogates the world-making effects that the articulation of environmental protection in a human rights register generates and questions the latter’s suitability for radical environmental politics in the Anthropocene. Overall, the book informs us about the management of legal conflicts by courts, the strategies they develop to justify their outcomes and the performative role they play in shaping our understanding of the environment–human rights interface.

This chapter provides an overview of key judgments by international courts and tribunals dealing with environmental and human rights protection. It focuses mainly on regional human rights courts to show how environmental protection has been dealt with under these mechanisms. The objective is not to offer a comprehensive analysis of the environmental jurisprudence of these judicial mechanisms, but to signal how a specific synergistic and anthropocentric framing of environmental protection emerged in catalytic judgments. A particular narrative of how the protection of the environment would benefit human rights – especially the right to health, to life and to adequate living conditions or family life, as well as the right to private property and the right to (ancestral) land – was produced and consistently re-affirmed through judicial cross-referencing. This was done by pointing out how environmental harms and ecological deterioration and pollution directly hamper human rights, including those of indigenous peoples and cultural minorities. In so doing, courts played a pivotal role in strengthening environmental protection in relation to human concerns, thereby also consolidating a particular representation of how a protected environment serves human interests and needs. A specific anthropocentric and synergistic understanding of the human–environment is thereby enacted and reenforced.

When environmental protection and human rights collide, regional human rights courts balance the competing interests at stake to determine optimal outcomes. In doing so, courts tend to frame environmental protection as a ‘general interest’ capable of limiting relative fundamental rights and freedoms. This construction of an integrated, common and shared social value is loaded with political agency. In dictating specific outcomes as being in the ‘general’ interest, this adjudicative practice projects particular ideals into the realm of universality. This chapter traces the origins and meanings of the general interest, its attribution to environmental protection and, most importantly, its invocation by regional human rights courts when solving conflicts between environmental and human rights concerns. The ability of judges to reframe the particular in universal terms through the heuristic of the ‘general interest’ is assessed in the light of Martti Koskenniemi’s theory on the (discursive) hegemony of international legal argumentation. When courts frame particular substantive, aesthetic or procedural dimensions of environmental protection as being in the general interest, they produce a hegemonic vision of the environment–human rights interface, which is continuously reproduced through judicial cross-referencing. Thereby, values set under established case law gradually crystallise into patterns, precedents and social norms.

This second part delves into concrete cases of conflicts between environmental protection and human rights decided by regional human rights courts. Instead of focusing on the outcomes of each case, the analysis attends to the legal reasoning and justifications articulated by judges when decisions are reached, and courts come to a resolution of adversarial argumentations. How do regional human rights courts balance individual or collective human rights against the interest in environmental protection, when environmental protection and human rights collide? What emerges is a process where parties counter legal indeterminacy by granting weight to specific legal, political and normative goals in an idiom of universality – namely through justifications in the name of ‘universal interests’ or ‘universal truth claims’. Two strategies of ‘universal justification’ are induced from the cases. First, conflicts between environmental protection and human rights tend to be solved though a ‘universalisation strategy’ that rests on an invocation of the ‘general interest’. Second, a ‘universalisation strategy’ is visible when courts settle disputes by relying on the ‘objectivity’ and ‘authority’ provided by scientific or human rights experts. New argumentative dynamics are induced from a critical case-law analysis that reveals particular understandings of the human–environment relation, which engenders specific world-making effects.