Prof. Godwin Dzah gives lesson in history of international environmental law

Assistant Professor Godwin Dzah of the University of Alberta Faculty of Law has published important new work in the Third World Approaches to International Law Review.

His article, “Marginalising Africa: The ‘New’ Human Right to a Clean, Healthy and Sustainable Environment in International Law,” argues that the recent enshrining of this right in the United Nations (UN) system has ignored and silenced Africa’s foundational role in the area.

Dzah shows that treating environmental sustainability as a human right has in fact been a part of African jurisprudence for over forty years, established in the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights and national constitutions.

Despite this, the UN (and particularly Western interests) has effectively silenced or obscured the crucial African developments of the concept, instead treating it as something novel and evolved through Eurocentric environmentalism, says Dzah.

“The history of the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment cannot be written without Africa’s profound contribution to the subject,” Dzah states.

The article forcefully challenges the notion that the concept of a clean environment as a human right is a new concept, as if magically appearing out of nowhere recently in the UN system.

“The presumption of novelty is problematic in its reflection of the continuing peripheral treatment of non-Western ideas,” the article says. “Worse still, the ongoing discourse imitates and reproduces well-tested patterns of the absorptive capacity of international law to coopt non-Western ideas through purposeful reinvention.”

Using the theoretical lenses of Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault, Dzah asks us to think about what is being excluded from this narrative of rights which was adopted by the UN Human Rights Council in 2021, and then the broader General Assembly in 2022.

“It is not so much which histories are eventually written into the evolutionary journey of this right,” he states, “but what is critically important is the relevant histories that are written out of this ‘globally’ unfolding story.”

Beyond the problematic colonial absorption and appropriation of ideas, Dzah also argues that rights can only be properly upheld and advanced when their historical roots are written into them.

The article states that if the West essentially plagiarizes the historical development of these rights, then they won’t be effective, and the world won’t be able to properly safeguard them or ensure a future where everyone has the right to a clean environment.

“The long-lasting effect of this kind of politics is that laws and policies that arise as outcomes of these international engagements are unrepresentative of the legal history that must play a central role in guiding the subsequent implementation of this right under international law.”

Dzah is unequivocal in his call to acknowledge Africa’s pioneering role in both the historical narrative and the further development of this human right that impacts us all.