When the WHO Guidelines Meet Environmental Law: Influence and Synergies.
(2022) 9th Conference of the European Environmental Law Forum (EELF): Rethinking Environmental Law — Location: Tarragona (20.September.2022)
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- Abstract
- The COVID-19 crisis highlighted the role of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the protection of public health at the global level. For more than a decade, the WHO considers the right to health to extend not only to timely and appropriate healthcare but also to the underlying determinants of health, such as environmental conditions. Hence, the WHO produces guidelines that form an authoritative basis for the setting of national regulations and standards for environmental aspects in support of public health, such as air quality, water quality or noise pollution. Altogether, environmental law and the WHO have a mutual influence. The Director-General of the WHO declared, in 2017, that the Paris Agreement could potentially be ‘the strongest health agreement of this century’. Such an environmental treaty is influential in the WHO discourse as we can find, in the 2020 WHO health Environment and Climate Change Strategy, the willingness to maximize synergies between both areas. In environmental matters, guidelines produced by the WHO are often referred to in the global policy discourse but also where discussion arises on legal instruments and in relation to the choice of a given level of protection, either at the legislative level or at the administrative level. While these WHO guidelines – and the specific numerical thresholds they suggest – are not meant to be compulsory (neither through formal requirements nor through their very substance), disparities between currently applicable legal standards and those guidelines are more and more frequently bemoaned as a kind of anomaly – either by health experts questioning the state of current legislation, by associations requiring more ambition from governments, by lawmakers in the process of discussing the adoption of new standards and even by judges. One of the topical questions today is whether the WHO guidelines correspond, by default, to a global and widely acknowledged scientific common ground. If they truly 'speak for science', this is not without consequences from the point of view of the law. The contribution explores, based on preliminary research results, the degree of influence of the WHO guidelines on environmental law and the reasons thereof. It shall observe their role in the interpretation of existing legislation, in the light of recent judgments dealing with environmental issues. It shall also discuss the influence of the argument on the adoption of new legal standards. Finally, it questions how environmental law may facilitate the protection of human health in line with the WHO's new strategy. Do these two worlds where standards are made to meet each other and conciliate – and is this the right question to ask, due to the aims and functions of each of them? Standards speaking for science, on the one hand; standards installed in law, on the other hand.
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Bertaux, C., & Misonne, D. (2022). When the WHO Guidelines Meet Environmental Law: Influence and Synergies. 9th Conference of the European Environmental Law Forum (EELF): Rethinking Environmental Law, Tarragona. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/164935