A Europe United by Values, Focused on Results It’s time for a legal right to a healthy environment he first-ever elected President of the Parliamentary Assembly was Paul-Henri Spaak, one of Belgium’s finest statesmen and also one of the founding fathers of the Council of Europe and, in due course, the EU.
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He once said: “If I have to choose between a perfect Europe and a better Europe, I will choose the better Europe, because the perfect Europe does not exist, but the better Europe we can create ourselves.” 70 years on, the body he helped to create – and which I now represent – speaks for 830 million Europeans in 47 nations. Yet many of them are disappointed by
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politicians, and what they see as our failure to get to grips with the real problems they are facing. It’s time for us to get down to business – and, following Spaak’s advice, I have some very practical suggestions for where we should begin. RIK DAEMS President of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe
... Keeping our planet healthy is one of the great challenges of our times. Every single one of us, wherever we come from, is directly affected by the environment – it is an issue which, almost by definition, transcends borders. Our Assembly inspired the drafting of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) 70 years ago, and has been a driving force for
updating it ever since. It is time for us to do so again. The ECHR already guarantees “the right to life”, but to me that clearly implies the right to live in an environment which sustains life. I believe the time has come to create a legally enforceable “right to a healthy environment” by drafting a protocol to the ECHR. As we have seen recently in the Netherlands, in France or in the UK, national courts are already beginning to make rulings in this area – but there is a risk that this takes place piece-meal, with the case-law diverging in different countries. A new protocol would enable Europeans to hold their
