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 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.