Environmental Rights

Steve Vanderheiden

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781409422969
• eBook ISBN: 9781351568050
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Umweltrecht

The essays selected for this volume present critical viewpoints from the debate about the need to establish rights on behalf of greater environmental protection. Three main areas for developing environmental rights are surveyed, including: extensionist theories that link existing rights (for example to subsistence or territory) to threats of harm from exacerbated resource scarcity, pollution or rapid environmental change; proposals for rights to specified environmental goods or services, such as rights to a safe environment and the capacity to assimilate greenhouse gas emissions; and rights that protect the interests of parties not currently recognized as having rights, including nonhuman subjects, natural objects and future generations. This volume captures the potential for and primary challenges to the development of rights as instruments for safeguarding the planet's life-support capacities and features proposals and analyses which argue the need to create an avenue of recourse against ecological degradation, whether on behalf of human or nonhuman right holders.

Part I
Human Rights: General

[1]
Environmental Injustice and Human Rights Abuse: The States, MNCs, and Repression of Minority Groups in the World System

Francis O. Adeola
Department of Sociology
University of New Orleans
New Orleans, LA 70148
USA¹

Abstract

The issues of global environmental injustice and human rights violations are the central focus of this article. Existing cross-national empirical data and case studies are utilized to assess and establish the patterns of transnational toxic-wastes dumping, natural resource exploitation, and human rights transgression. The bases of global environmental injustice are explored. Theoretically, dependency/world system, internal colonialism perspectives, economic contingency, and transnational environmental justice frameworks are used to analyze transnational toxic waste dumping, land appropriation and natural resource exploitation adversely affecting indigenous minorities in underdeveloped societies. With a particular focus on selected cases, available evidence suggests that the poor, powerless indigenous minorities and many environmental and civil rights activists face the danger of environmental injustice and human rights abuse, especially in less developed nations. Significant correlations were found between social inequality, poverty, total external debts, demographic measures, health and solid wastes in the analysis of a cross-national data-set for developing nations. To foster global environmental justice, this study suggests that stronger international norms to protect human rights to a safe and sound environment are imperative; and it is argued that environmental injustice needs to be included as a component of human rights instruments. Other policy implications of the analyses are also discussed.

Keywords: global environmental injustice, toxic waste dumping, environmental risks, human rights violations, indigenous minorities, inequality, environmental degradation, grass-roots environmental activism, world system

Introduction

The issues of environmental injustice and human rights transgressions at the local, state, national, and transnational levels have attracted social scientists' interest in recent years (Bullard 1990; Neff 1990; Nickel 1993; Nickel and Viola 1994; Adeola 1994; Weinberg 1998). The major attributes of the world capitalist system shifting environmental pollution and its negative impacts to poor communities both in the U.S. and Third World have been addressed by numerous scholars (Schnaiberg 1975; Buttel 1987; Bunker 1985; Clapp 1994; Stratton 1976; Moyers 1990; Bullard 1994; Adeola 2000a). The rights to a safe environment (RSE) have been emphasized as an essential component of fundamental human rights (Dias 1999; Thorme 1991; Nickel 1993; Neff 1990; Boyle and Anderson 1998). In most cases, environmental degradation leads to human rights transgressions and quite often, human rights abuse involves serious ecological disruptions.

In the U.S., the evolution and amalgamation of grass-roots civil rights and environmental justice movements have been especially instrumental in confronting the problems of inequitable distribution of environmental hazards and associated health effects caused by the activities of powerful corporations and the state. Strong environmental movements, the Not-in-My-Backyard (NIMBY) syndrome, and strong legislative responses to hazardous waste disposal, have: drastically increased the costs of hazardous waste management, making the exports of industrial wastes quite attractive. As environmentalism and public opposition to waste siting increased in industrialized countries, cross-national trade in hazardous waste became a common practice in the 1970s and escalated between the 1980s and the 1990s (Clapp 1994). The problems associated with toxic waste imports have been a major concern in many Third World countries from the 1980s to the present. Toxic waste dumping represents one of several activities that involve serious human rights abuse, ecological disruptions, and environmental injustice. Other activities such as natural resource exploitation by the state and Multinational Corporations (MNCs), land acquisition, and large-scale economic development projects are rife with human rights abuse. Despite the prominence of these problems, there are several salient research questions yet to be resolved.

The specific questions addressed in this study are: (1) To what extent does hazardous waste dumping, diminution of habitats, appropriation of natural resources, and selective exposure of certain populations to environmental hazards constitute a violation of basic human rights? (2) Are environmental justice principles consistent or compatible with specific articles of Human Rights Declarations? (3) Is there substantial empirical evidence to support the claims of environmental injustice and ecologically-related human rights abuse locally and across nations? (4) What are the bases of global environmental injustice; i.e., who are the major actors in the global political economy contributing to environmental injustice and related human rights abuse? (5) Are there significant links between MNCs' activities and episodes of environmental injustice and human rights transgression in the Third World? (6) What kind of relationships exists between social inequity, world system variables, poverty, freedom, human rights, and environmental degradation? These salient questions will be addressed using existing empirical evidence and case studies.

This article focuses on environmental injustice and human rights violations associated with cross-national toxic waste dumping, natural resource exploitation, and the consequent degradation of the means of subsistence of indigenous people. The roles of the state and MNCs in suppressing the rights of communal groups to a safe and sound environment are examined. Furthermore, the alliance of states, elites, and MNCs in transnational hazardous waste schemes, natural resource exploitation, and suppression of minority rights are discussed. More specifically, the objectives of this study are: (1) To assess the general patterns and direction of flow of toxic wastes between the industrialized and less-industrialized nations involving environmental injustice; (2) To offer theoretical and empirical analyses of transnational environmental inequity, natural resource exploitation, and human rights repression; (3) To address how toxic waste dumping, natural resource exploitation, repression of indigenous minority groups, and other types of human rights abuse are connected to MNCs activities in underdeveloped societies; (4) To explain the linkage between environmental justice and human rights; and (5) To identify the bases of global environmental injustice and offer potential remedies.

Following the introduction, the article proceeds in four major components. In the first segment, the conceptual issues of environmental injustice and human rights violations are discussed. The second part offers theoretical and empirical explications of the variation in the North to South traffic of hazardous wastes as a major transnational environmental injustice issue. Also, theoretical discourse concerning the influence of stratification systems on environmental injustice, and human rights transgressions at the local and cross-national levels is presented. In the third part, selected cases of environmental injustice are presented to illustrate how human rights violations and environmental injustice are closely related. The strategies for achieving global environmental justice and the need for international codification of norms pertaining to the rights of all people to clean air, water, and a safe and sound environment capable of sustaining life are offered in the concluding section. The policy and theoretical implications are also discussed.

Background

Environmental injustice and human rights transgressions are inextricably intertwined.² For example, a strong positive relationship between environmental degradation and human rights violations has been noted in the literature suggesting the presence of human rights abuse in most cases of environmental degradation (Dias 1999; Johnston 1994). Seizure of communal lands, displacement of indigenous communities, natural resource exploitation, and toxic waste dumping connote environmental injustice and human rights abuse. In recent years, assaults on the environment and human rights have escalated to an unprecedented level in human history (see Amnesty International 1995; Donnelly 1998; Howard 1995). Over the past two decades, the world has witnessed a large number of cases involving ecological and human rights problems ranging from the military government extermination of indigenous population in Irian Jaya, Indonesia, to ecological assaults and human rights violations in Africa, the Balkans, Latin America, Malaysia, and the Philippines, which all suggest the need to frame environmental rights as a significant component of human rights issues.

Among the recent eases of environmental injustice and human rights violations in the Third World are: the murder of Wilson Pinheiro and Francisco "Chico" Mendes in the Amazon rain forest, the massacre of Father Nery Lito Satur and several others in the Philippines, and the public hanging of Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other members of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP) in November 1995 in Nigeria. The subsequent detention, torture, and repression of other members of MOSOP are among the most compelling cases of environmental and civil rights transgression in developing nations monitored by Human Rights Watch (HRW 1999), Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC 1992), Amnesty International, and other Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs). There have been several other cases of government agents especially in the Third World, adopting a policy of systematic genocide against members of minority groups in order to appropriate their lands and natural resources. The subjugation of indigenous minority groups extends to the subjugation of nature and the consequent ecological degradation. Minority status, lower socioeconomic status, powerlessness, and other conditions of marginalization constitute the major factors influencing the extent of environmental injustice and human rights repression (Adeola 1994, 2000b; Bullard 1990; Morrison 1976; Glazer and Glazer 1998),

In their analyses of resource induced conflicts, Gurr (1993), Homer-Dixon (1994), and Renner (1996) each points out that government uses of absolute power in post-colonial and post-revolutionary states involved policies directed at communal groups' assimilation, repression of their independence, and usurpation of their resources, which often result in violent conflict. The minority groups and indigenous peoples throughout the world face significant risks (see Gormley 1976; Obibi 1995; Sachs 1996). Indigenous populations, ethnoclasses and other minorities, and their rights to land, natural resources, clean air, good health, and environmental protection are viewed by the dominant group as expendable for the sake of national security, national unity, and economic development (see Johnston 1994, 11; Stavenhagen 1996; Lane and Rickson 1997). The global trends of industrialization, economic expansion, and globalization resting on increased exploitation of natural resources, have mostly been at the expense of communal groups. Their natural resources and physical labor are being incorporated into the national and international webs of economic activities (Gurr 1993; Bunker 1985).

An examination of a wide range of regions from the Amazon Basin to northern Saskatchewan, to tropical rain forests of the Amazon, to the remote state of Borneo in Malaysia, to sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, reveals that the exploitation of natural resources, including energy production, timber harvesting, mineral extraction, oil exploration, hydro-electric and other mega-industrial projects by MNCs and host governments, has caused significant damages. These damages include dislocation and decimation of numerous indigenous communities and their entire ways of life (Gedicks 1993, 13; Stavenhagen 1996). In many developing Countries, indigenous peoples and other vulnerable and impoverished communities, including subsistence peasants, fishing communities, hunters and gatherers, and nomadic groups are generally the victims of...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I HUMAN RIGHTS: GENERAL
• PART II HUMAN RIGHTS AND CLIMATE CHANGE
• PART III RIGHTS OF NONHUMANS, ENVIRONMENT AND FUTURITY
• PART IV RIGHTS TO A SAFE ENVIRONMENT
• Name Index