Page 19 - รายงานการศึกษาวิจัย เรื่อง ความสัมพันธ์ระหว่างสิทธิมนุษยชนและสิ่งแวดล้อมเพื่อการคุ้มครองสิทธิมนุษยชนที่เกี่ยวกับสิ่งแวดล้อมอย่างยั่งยืน
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ส�ำนักงำนคณะกรรมกำรสิทธิมนุษยชนแห่งชำติ
highest standard can be regarded as violation of the rights holders already occurred. People can
always claim against the State to protect the environment. Therefore, this type of rights is “collective
rights”. It is noticeable that the right to clean or good environment is always used together with the
right to development which is also one type of collective rights. It is regarded that protection of the
right to good environment helps leading to efficiently respect and protect the right to development,
which is suitable to less developed and developing countries willing to enhance the respect of
the right to development. However, the right to good environment which is the positive right is
still opposed by developed countries and not be accepted as human rights due to the lack of
universality of being human rights.
3) Human rights and the environmental protection – Environmental protection is “pre-
requisite” in order to make the human rights protection: the right to environment or neighboring
rights of environmental protection such as the right to life and the right to health, to be more
completed. Therefore, whether countries accept the right to environment as human rights or not, it is
no more necessary to make the right to environment as human rights. Using the environmental
protection for enhancing the human rights is the best way. Any country effectively protecting
environment will automatically protect human rights.
4) Procedural rights for environmental protection is important mechanism – It is the existing
rights which help reaching the environmental protection in addition to the substantive rights and are
explicitly written in most international documents relating to environment. Therefore, in protecting
the environment, the procedural rights should not be neglected by States. Thailand should be enact
a law related to procedural rights at domestic level.
Issues Directly Relevant to Building Common Scholarly Understanding
for the Sake of Further Study in the Next Step
Study on the way in writing the provisions on environmental protection in the constitu-
tion as the highest law of the land, since it is the pre-requisite for the State to do before protecting
other types of human rights, and also because destruction of environment has impacts on many
types of human rights. This should include study on enforcement of the right to environment in
the countries that already guaranteed the right to environment through comparison between
constitutions of various countries both developed and developing countries.
Study on connection among new types of rights and the existing rights in the consti-
tutions and other legislations for facilitating effective law enforcement. The lack of this connection
can create not only difficulty for enforcing the new rights but also conflict among various rights.
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