By: Dr. Mohammad Eyadat
Chairman of NCEJ The National Center for Environmental Justice
Fifty years after the Stockholm Declaration, do we still only have one land? It is that question and the question that is still wrestling itself between reality, ambition and hope, between liberal, capitalist and developmental, between those who know and those who are ignorant and those who ignore, between the sceptic and the sceptical, between those who support and the opposition, between the defending advocate and the opposing opponent, is the struggle between generations that has not and will not end.
In the period between 1968-1969, the United Nations General Assembly, with its resolution No. 23/2398 and Resolution No. 24/2581, concluded that a world conference would be held in 1972 to be based in Stockholm, Sweden, which represented a practical way to encourage and put forward guidelines for the protection and improvement of the human environment and prevention of One of the main goals of the conference was to approve a declaration on the human environment to form a document of basic principles.
The idea of the conference arose from a proposal submitted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), and was prepared by the Preparatory Committee for the conference in 1971, while the actual drafting of the text was entrusted to the an intergovernmental working group, although there was general agreement on the declaration, it was not formulated in legally binding language, Progress on the Declaration has been slow due to differences of opinion among states about the degree to which the principles and guidelines contained in the Declaration are defined, and whether the Declaration will recognize an individual’s basic need for a satisfactory environment, or if it will include general principles clarifying the rights and obligations of states in relation to the environment.
By 1972, in the month of January, the working group was able to prepare a draft declaration, although there were parties that considered postponing the pretext of the need for more work, but the Preparatory Committee did not want to prejudice the delicate balance on which the consensual text was based, so it refrained from Any technical review of the text and took the initiative to submit a draft declaration consisting of a preamble and 23 principles to the conference, and at the request of China, a special working group re-reviewed the text, and the text was reduced to 21 principles with the formulation of 4 new principles, and the text of a draft principle on (prior notification) was deleted. ) At the suggestion of Brazil, The Declaration was then referred to the General Assembly for further consideration.
On June 16, 1972, the Conference adopted this document by acclamation and referred it again to the General Assembly. During the discussions that took place in the Bilateral Committee of the General Assembly, many countries expressed several reservations. In the face of a number of provisions, but did not fundamentally oppose the declaration itself, including the republics of the Soviet Union and its allies, and in the end the declaration was adopted by 112 votes to none with 10 members abstaining.
During the Stockholm Conference and in accordance with Resolution No. (2916) dated February 15, 1972, the Stockholm Declaration was issued, which came in the preamble and twenty-six principles. An international document that recognizes the human right to a peaceful environment as a universal right and directly, and its principles represent a global environmental system that is relied upon to organize the future activities of countries in the field of the environment.
Although the Declaration lacked the element of commitment in its provisions and in the face of states, as many international jurists have held, its moral and moral value in the important principles contained in the Declaration enshrined many of the rules of traditional international law, as this Declaration is the first step to establish principles Customary underpinning customary international environmental law.
With the increasing exacerbation of environmental issues, which crossed the borders of geography of countries, the United Nations General Assembly quickly established the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP), which was established by General Assembly Resolution No. 2997/D/27 on December 15, 1992 and considered the environmental voice of the United Nations, and from Its main objectives are the conduct of international cooperation in the field of the environment and the embodiment of the Stockholm principles and the agreements concerned with environmental affairs, which give a new impetus to the systems of environmental management, implementation and control, and to provide financial resources and urge their activation at the national, regional and international levels.
With the beginning of the program’s work, it worked to unify international efforts to address international environmental issues in the form of concluding international treaties and agreements with environmental jurisdiction. Technology, capacity building, and program to combat deforestation, forest degradation and climate change.
The program launched the idea of linking environmental action with sustainable development, which led to the establishment of the International Commission on Environment and Development, known as the Commission on Sustainable Development, which was approved by the international community at the 1992 Rio Conference. These committees and United Nations bodies in the field of human rights and the environment formed an international system in a report Respecting those rights in an administrative consensus within that system to protect the environment and linking it to sustainable development and the enshrinement of environmental human rights.
Since that date, the Stockholm Declaration has become an attempt to formulate a general and basic view of the method that allows addressing the challenge of preserving and enhancing the human environment, which has taken this right to a new dimension in terms of its consolidation in individual and collective awareness at the national and international levels.
This conference was the starting point for the race to consecrate environmental rights at the level of international texts, instruments and mechanisms of action, which are translated into reality by an international legal framework for the environment that makes man a global citizen whose right to live in a clean and sound environment is not limited to a specific geographical area, but rather gives him an extension in time from Whereas, preserving the rights of future generations to natural resources, depletable resources or endangered species on the one hand, and the emergence of the concept of protecting the natural environment as a legal concept that can be protected as a self-contained reformer on the other hand.
Since that date the word environment was used for the first time in its legal form at a conference in 1972, in place of the term Milien Humen and … the need for legal rules of English grammar.
Since the Stockholm Environment Conference, which has devoted the concepts related to the environment, land and resources, and consecrated the right to live in a sound and favourable environment and in a quality environment that allows living in a dignified and sound life, the world is progressing and regressing steps, and the issue of the environment is still one of the most serious problems of the modern era that needs special attention and continuous, It is also one of the multi-faceted and multidimensional problems and is characterized by its cumulative nature formed over the years as a result of the interaction between many political, economic and social factors, some of which are related to production and development, and others related to consumption and its patterns, ignoring the human dimensions of the environment or the restrictions imposed by nature on development processes in the midst of The interest in capital accumulation has led to the occurrence of many environmental problems that have become of a high degree of seriousness, which has led to the emergence of the so-called global ecological problems or the cosmic problems that we are witnessing today with clarity.
The Stockholm Declaration of the Environment is not just a historical document, but rather a cosmic roadmap that extends over the course of human life, until God inherits the earth and those on it.
Since that date, the question has been raised (Only One Earth) And if the question does not entail responsibility for the inquirer, will we find the responsible answer from whom the burden of responsibility falls…
