Miss the opportunity to see our “The 1972 Stockholm Declaration at 50: Reflecting on a Half-Century of International Environmental Law” live on October 8?

No worries: We at the Dean Rusk International Law Center and the Georgia Journal of International and Comparative Law, University of Georgia School of Law, are happy to provide videolinks.

This daylong conference addressed, in the words of MJ Durkee, the Georgia Law faculty member who conceptualized it,

“one of the foremost challenges of our time: What the international community can do about the crises facing our environment and the link between environmental health and human flourishing.”

Durkee, who is Associate Dean for International Programs, Director of our Dean Rusk International Law Center, and Allen Post Professor, further noted the timeliness of the conference:

“The Stockholm Declaration, in addition to launching the field of international environmental law 50 years ago, was also among the first to articulate the idea of a human right to a healthy environment, and to elevate this as a matter of world concern. Just today, in Geneva, the UN Human Rights Council has been deliberating over a resolution recognizing that this human right to a healthy environment has matured into an internationally recognized human right.”

Also in this segment is the first of three panels, entitled “The Rights-Based Approach to Environmental Protection,” and featuring a global array of panelists: Nnimmo Bassey, Director, Health of Mother Earth Foundation, pictured at bottom center; Tyler Giannini, Clinical Professor and Co-Director of the Harvard Human Rights Program and the International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law, top right; Kate Mackintosh, Executive Director, Promise Institute for Human Rights, UCLA Law, middle left; Katie O’Bryan, Lecturer, Monash University, Australia, middle right; and moderator Diane Marie Amann, Regents’ Professor of International Law, Emily & Ernest Woodruff Chair in International Law and Faculty Co-Director of the Dean Rusk International Law Center at Georgia Law, top left.

Her welcome, as well as introductory remarks from Georgia Law Dean Peter B. “Bo” Rutledge and Eva Hunnius Ohlin, Senior Advisor for Energy and Environment at the Embassy of Sweden in Washington, D.C., appear in the first of three conference video segments, available here.

Principle 1 of the Stockholm Declaration begins:

“Man has the fundamental right to freedom, equality and adequate conditions of life, in an environment of a quality that permits a life of dignity and well-being …”

Considering that claim in relation to “humankind,” panelists explored a range of issues, including: the utility, or not, of the rights-based approach; comparison of the rights-based approach with others, including the rights of nature and harmony with nature; and the recent civil-society promulgation of a definition of the international crime of ecocide, with the aim of amending the 1998 Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court to include this crime.

Interested in other segments of our Stockholm conference? Stay tuned.

(Update: The full series of links is available here.)