Online petition launched for an enforceable human right to a healthy environment

Date: 16th December 2021
Category: Disability, Basic Health and Welfare

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To ensure everyone in Scotland lives in a healthy environment, we must be able to hold public bodies and polluters to account. To do this, a petition has been launched which includes recommendations to Scottish Government to make sure the right to a healthy environment is enforced by law.

The petition calls on the Scottish Government to:

1. Ensure our right to a healthy environment is enforceable in a court of law against public bodies and polluters, with effective remedies
2. Ensure our right to a healthy environment guarantees the highest standards for clean air, a safe climate, access to safe water and adequate sanitation, healthy and sustainably produced food, non-toxic environments in which to live, work, study and play, and healthy biodiversity and ecosystems
3. Reform legal expenses so that it is affordable for all of us to uphold environmental laws in a court or tribunal
4. Create a specialist environmental court which is affordable and accessible for everyone, fair, timely and effective

To accompany this petition, ERCS has set out what legal reforms are needed to implement an enforceable human right to a healthy environment in its advocacy manifesto.

• Read the manifesto here.
• Sign the petition here.