Atapattu

This book presents an in-depth analysis of how UN human rights institutions and mechanisms have addressed environmental protection, sustainable development, and climate change.

Despite the increasing involvement of UN human rights bodies in addressing environmental degradation and climate change, a systematic review of the convergence between human rights and the environment in these bodies has not been carried out. Filing this lacuna, this book surveys the resolutions, general comments, concluding observations, decisions on individual communications and press releases. It identifies principles that have emerged, explores the ways in which human rights charter-based and treaty-based institutions are interpreting environmental principles and examines how they contribute to the emerging field of human rights and the environment. Given the disproportionate effect that polluting activities have on marginalized and vulnerable groups, Atapattu also discusses how these human rights mechanisms have addressed the impact on women, children, indigenous peoples, people with disabilities, and racial minorities.

Written by a world-renowned expert on human rights and the environment, this book will be of great interest to students and scholars researching and teaching in this important field of study.

Sumudu Atapattu is teaching professor and Director of the Global Legal Studies Center at the University of Wisconsin Law School. She is also the Executive Director of the campus-wide interdisciplinary Human Rights Program. She serves as the Lead Counsel for Human Rights at the Center for International Sustainable Development Law based in Montreal, Canada, is on the advisory board of the McGill International Journal of Sustainable Development Law and Policy and is affiliated faculty at the Raoul Wallenberg Institute for Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Sweden. She has published widely in the fields of international environmental law, climate change and human rights, environmental rights, and sustainable development. Her books include Emerging Principles of International Environmental Law (Transnational, 2006), Human Rights Approaches to Climate Change: Challenges and Opportunities (Routledge, 2016), International Environmental Law and the Global South (co-editor); Human Rights and Environment: Key Issues (co-author, Routledge, 2019) and The Cambridge Handbook on Environmental Justice and Sustainable Development (co-editor) and numerous book chapters and articles. Before moving to the USA, she was a senior lecturer at Faculty of Law, University of Colombo, Sri Lanka, and consultant to the Law & Society Trust, Colombo. She holds an LL.M. (Public International Law) and a Ph.D. (International Environmental Law) from the University of Cambridge, U.K., and is an Attorney-at-Law of the Supreme Court of Sri Lanka.