Rights of the Child Realizing the Rights of the Child Through a Healthy Environment

A/HRC/RES/45/30View PDF

Who adopted this document and its mandates?

A Resolution of the Human Rights Council, under agenda item 3 Promotion and protection of all human rights, civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights, including the right to development, published in 2020.

What subjects does this mandate have?

9 subjects

Child Health Child Labour Climate Change Corporate Social Responsibility Environment Environmental Degradation Family Reunification Human Rights Policy Rights of the Child

What’s in this document?

41 operative paragraphs

Takes note with appreciation of the report of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights on realizing the rights of the child through a healthy environment;²

²A/HRC/43/30.

Urges States to respect, protect and fulfil the rights of the child, without discrimination of any kind, including in efforts to implement their obligations and commitments under multilateral environmental instruments and agreements, and to achieve the Goals and targets of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development;

Acknowledges the vital importance of ensuring that every child of present and future generations can enjoy an environment adequate to their health and well-being, and that preventing environmental harm is the most effective way to fully protect children from its effects;

Urges States to take the necessary measures to ensure the full enjoyment by children of all their human rights and fundamental freedoms, and to protect them from the effects of environmental harm through effective regulation and enforcement mechanisms, including by:

Ensuring that the best interest of the child is a primary consideration in environmental decision-making by adopting a child rights-based approach and by recognizing the critical importance of child rights impact assessments of relevant laws, standards and policies to evaluate their actual impact on the rights of the child;

Committing to take precautionary action whenever there are threats of serious or irreversible damage to children from the effects of environmental harm, while noting that a lack of full scientific certainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-efficient measures to prevent such threats;

Considering recognizing a right to a healthy environment in national legislation in order to promote justiciability, strengthen accountability and facilitate greater participation, improving environmental protection and performance and ensuring rights for present and future generations;

Enhancing cross-sectoral cooperation and strengthening regulatory agencies and ministries responsible for overseeing standards relevant to the rights of the child implicated by exposure to pollution, hazardous substances and wastes, climate change and the loss of biodiversity with a view to ensuring that sufficient monitoring of laws, policies and implementation mechanisms are in place to protect children from the effects of such environmental harm;

Strengthening efforts to monitor childhood exposure by collecting information on the impact of environmental harm on children, in particular exposure to hazardous substances, wastes and pollution, and ensuring that child-rights impact assessments take into account the ways in which environmental harm affects girls and boys differently, making such information publicly available and accessible while ensuring it is available also in age-responsive language and formats;

Taking immediate and effective measures to eradicate forced labour and to secure the prohibition and elimination of the worst forms of child labour, including hazardous child labour, and putting an end to child labour in all its forms, inter alia through the enforcement of the fundamental principles and rights at work and by eliminating work by children where they are exposed to hazardous substances and wastes, while ensuring that children who have been subjected to such exposure have access to the necessary treatment and compensation;

Integrating gender-responsive measures into their laws, policies and programmes relevant to the protection of children from the effects of environmental harm, including by addressing sexual and gender-based violence risks;

Also urges States to ensure the right of the child to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health, without discrimination of any kind, including sexual and reproductive health, throughout their life course, by inter alia:

Ensuring the availability, quality, accessibility and acceptability of health information and goods, and of health-care services;

Taking measures to ensure that the underlying determinants of health, such as food, water and housing, are free from hazardous substances;

Identifying and eliminating sources of exposure of children to indoor and outdoor air pollution and substances of high concern, such as heavy metals and endocrine disrupting chemicals;

Ensuring that all children, in particular girls, are guaranteed protection from occupational exposure to hazardous substances and wastes;

Taking all necessary measures to protect children from the health, social, and economic consequences of epidemics and pandemics by integrating the rights of the child into national contingency and recovery plans;

Further urges States to take effective measures to ensure that all children in vulnerable situations can exercise their rights on an equal basis with other children, and that the effects of environmental harm do not affect them disproportionately, including by strengthening the collection of disaggregated data, by requiring that childhood exposure monitoring and children’s rights impact assessment procedures take fully into account the impact of proposed policies, programmes and projects on those in the most vulnerable situations, including their gender dimensions, and by providing children at particular risk and their parents, or primary caregivers and legal guardians, with assistance in accessing effective remedies;

Urges States to ensure that children have access to justice and timely, effective, inclusive and gender-, disability- and age-responsive remedies when exposed to violations or abuse of their rights through the effects of environmental harm, including by providing relevant information concerning violations and reparation mechanisms, access to effective assistance for children and, where relevant, for and through their parents, caregivers and legal guardians, independent complaints procedures that are child sensitive, and by ensuring effective and prompt reparation of harm suffered and prevention of future violations, inter alia through the remediation of contaminated sites, the cessation of the acts or inaction that give rise to negative impacts, the provision of necessary medical and psychological services and care, the enacting of regulations to stop the production and sale of harmful products and by providing adequate compensation;

Calls upon States to consider ratifying the Convention on the Rights of the Child and the Optional Protocols thereto, and calls also for renewed efforts towards their full implementation by all parties;

Urges States to create opportunities for children’s inclusive and meaningful participation, in accordance with their evolving capacities, in environmental decision-making processes that are likely to affect their development and survival, including by ensuring girls’ meaningful participation in such processes on an equal basis with boys, by:

Taking affirmative action to respect, protect and fulfil the rights of the child to freedom of expression, freedom of association and freedom of peaceful assembly;

Developing consultative mechanisms and ensuring that mitigation and adaptation measures are developed with the best interest of the child as a primary consideration, based upon participatory, evidence-based decision-making processes that take into account the views of children;

Providing a safe and empowering context for initiatives organized by children and child- and youth-led movements that defend human rights relating to a healthy, safe and sustainable environment, and ensuring their protection from all acts of intimidation, harassment and abuse;

Providing for environmental education throughout the educational process of pupils to increase their awareness and understanding of environmental issues and their respect for the natural environment, and to strengthen their knowledge and capacity to respond to environmental challenges, while at all stages of such education taking into account children’s culture, language and environmental situation and by considering the adoption of environmental education strategies and curricula;

Providing training on environmental issues to school teachers as to allow them to carry out effective teaching on environmental issues and challenges;

Ensuring the availability and accessibility of adequate and age- and disability-responsive information on the effects of environmental harm, including pollution, hazardous substances and wastes, the loss of biodiversity and climate change on their impact and adaptive responses, and about appropriate lifestyle choices for sustainable development, including consumption behaviours;

Increasing public awareness to promote community engagement and child creativity and knowledge, and strengthening cooperation, joint efforts and knowledge exchange to engage all stakeholders and to create partnerships to respond collectively to environmental challenges;

Also urges States to take all necessary, appropriate and reasonable measures to prevent businesses from causing or contributing to children’s rights abuses, including by:

Regularly monitoring business activities’ environmental impacts and ensuring that they comply with all applicable health and safety, labour, environmental and consumer laws and standards, and where relevant strengthening regulation to ensure enforcement of the rights of the child in the context of business activities and environmental harm;

Requiring businesses to undertake child rights due diligence appropriate to their size, the risk of severe impact and the context of their operations, and ensuring that businesses meet their obligation to respect the rights of the child throughout their operations;

Developing and updating national action plans on business and human rights that include consideration of the effects of environmental harm, particularly the adverse impact of business activities on the rights of the child through exposure to pollution and hazardous substances and wastes;

Taking steps to ensure, through judicial, administrative, legislative or other appropriate means, that, when abuses of the rights of the child occur within their territory and/or jurisdiction, those affected have access to an effective remedy, without fear of reprisals;

Calls upon all business enterprises to meet their responsibility to respect the rights of the child by undertaking child rights due diligence, appropriate to their size, the risk of severe impact and the context of their operation, to identify risks and to prevent children from being exposed to the effects of environmental harm through their activities, and to prevent and mitigate exposure through their business relationships, as outlined in the recommendations of the Committee on the Rights of the Child in its general comment No. 16 (2013), the Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights, the International Labour Organization Tripartite Declaration of Principles concerning Multinational Enterprises and Social Policy and the Children’s Rights and Business Principles;

Calls upon States to increase cooperation to address the effects of environmental harm on the rights of the child, including by sharing information on the hazardous properties of chemicals, such toxicity and other characteristics of concern, and of products containing them, by ensuring that international trade in chemicals and waste is in full compliance with the relevant environmental treaties, and by adhering to their human rights obligations;

Urges States to ensure that considerations of the rights of the child are integrated in their environmental, climate, disaster risk reduction, humanitarian and development activities, monitoring and reporting, and also to ensure policy coherence in these fields in order to establish a coherent approach to sustainable development that benefits all persons, particularly children and future generations;

Calls upon States to develop ambitious mitigation measures to minimize the future negative impacts of climate change on children to the greatest extent possible by holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and by pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, to develop adaptation plans and to make finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate-resilient development, in accordance with the commitments undertaken by each State under the Paris Agreement and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and to consider their respective obligations regarding the rights of the child and intergenerational equity in their climate change adaptation and mitigation and environmental strategies;

Follow-up

Encourages the special procedures and other human rights mechanisms of the Human Rights Council to continue to integrate a child rights perspective while implementing their mandates, and to include in their reports information, qualitative analysis and recommendations on the rights of the child, paying attention to the adverse impact of environmental harm on the full enjoyment of those rights;

Invites all human rights treaty bodies to continue to integrate the rights of the child into their work, in particular in their concluding observations, general comments and recommendations, paying attention to the adverse impact of environmental harm on the full enjoyment of their rights;

Decides to continue its consideration of the question of the rights of the child in accordance with its programme of work and its resolutions 7/29 of 28 March 2008 and 19/37 of 23 March 2012, and to focus its next annual full-day meeting on the theme “the rights of the child and the Sustainable Development Goals”, and requests the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to make the discussion fully accessible to persons with disabilities and to prepare a summary report on the annual day discussion, and to present it to the Human Rights Council at its forty-eighth session;

Requests the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights to prepare a report on the rights of the child and family reunification, in close cooperation with all relevant stakeholders, including States, the United Nations Children’s Fund, other relevant United Nations bodies and agencies, the Special Representative of the Secretary-General on Violence against Children and the Special Representative of the Secretary-General for Children and Armed Conflict, relevant special procedure mandate holders, regional organizations and human rights bodies, national human rights institutions and civil society, including through consultations with children themselves, and to present the report to the Human Rights Council at its forty-ninth session with a view to providing information for the 2022 annual day of discussion on the rights of the child, and requests the Office of the High Commissioner to make the discussion fully accessible to persons with disabilities.

Who adopted this document and its mandates?

What subjects does this mandate have?

What’s in this document?

Follow-up

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