Right to Environment

In absence of a specific right to environment in international human rights instruments, international and regional courts investigate into the existing human rights norms in international instruments to prove the existence of a right to environment. This global trend of intersecting different human right norms to assemble a right to environment is mistaking the conceptual framework of right to environment resulting the national courts to adopt a disfigured approach to protect the right to environment. Bangladesh, not going a different way, is merely following the global trend of intersecting approach. This approach neither recognizes an inclusive right to environment nor offers a comprehensive alternative to the right to environment. Instead, it results in a multiplicity of judicial proceedings, disharmony in judicial interpretations, conservative attitude of court in dealing with environmental claims ensuing the right to environment as a subsidiary right etc. for bringing forth several complexities in the understanding and application of a right to environment. This paper will precisely describe the procedural history of public interest environmental litigation in Bangladesh in order to show how the intersecting approach has become a frequently used tool for enforcing a right to environment in the country. It will also foreground a discussion surrounding the global trend of reading together multiple enumerated human rights in international instruments in order to cobble together something resembling a right to environment and how this approach is contradictory to the fundamental nature of human rights. It will also discuss how the Supreme Court of Bangladesh is missteering by following the global trend of interpreting different constitutional fundamental rights together to assemble a right to environment. By examining the contemporary judicial approach of intersecting different existing fundamental rights to create a right to environment, this paper will argue for an emerging necessity for a judicially enforceable and comprehensively defined right to environment in the Constitution of Bangladesh.