She said they were in the midst of a triple planetary crisis, due to the climate emergency, pervasive toxic pollution, and the collapse of biodiversity, crises which were already threatening human rights on a vast scale. She pointed out that over 20 million people were displaced every year due to extreme weather events, and pollution caused one in six deaths globally. In Europe, air pollution caused hundreds of thousands of deaths each year, 1 200 of those being children. She said it was easy to get lost in statistics and numbers, but everyone could also think of just one child, maybe close to them, dying a premature death, simply by the act of breathing due to inhaling polluted air. She said even though future generations would be the ones to bear the brunt of this emergency, you could already see the effects of the triple planetary crisis on the lives of millions of people around the globe, preventing their full enjoyment of fundamental rights. Ms HALLGRIMSDÓTTIR pointed out that this crisis disproportionately affected already marginalised groups, including women and girls, indigenous people, refugees, people living in poverty and people with disabilities. A sense of urgency was required to act, and to secure the right of all Europeans to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. Ms HALLGRIMSDÓTTIR’s second point was that it was a misnomer to refer to a right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment as a “new right”, since it was already recognised by the majority of the world's regional human rights institutions or systems. This only meant that the European one was lagging behind, since it was found in the majority of the world's constitutions or environmental legislations, and that also applied to the majority of the Council of Europe member States. They already had decades of experience with the right and its protection at the national level, and the European Court of Human Rights was already dealing with cases that related to the right to a healthy environment. There had been over 300 cases in which the Court had ruled on environmental harms affecting the full enjoyment of human rights. Ms HALLGRIMSDÓTTIR also said that the “newness” of it seemed to be that the Council of Europe had lost its status as a pioneer in human rights protection and was lagging behind. She wanted to emphasise that in the current context, delay mattered. Every additional degree of warming mattered, every additional extinct species mattered, and every additional life lost to a triple planetary crisis mattered. The urgency of the situation had been recognised at the UN General Assembly in 2022 with the adoption of a Resolution declaring access to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment a universal human right. This Resolution was one which all 46 member States of the Council of Europe voted in favour of. The one logical step forward was for the Council of Europe to demonstrate that it was fully committed to accelerating climate and environmental action and prioritising human rights, by adopting additional protocol to the European Convention on Human Rights, recognising the right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment. Ms BRYNJÓLFSDÓTTIR thanked Ms HALLGRIMSDÓTTIR for her reflection. She opened the floor for questions. Mr Rik DAEMS thanked Mr Tiny KOX for his kind words. He said that the President only did the agenda setting and the work was done by the whole Parliamentary Assembly. What happened during his and Mr KOX’s presidencies was the fact that they had a fantastic team of members of parliament and the Secretariat who worked hard in order to produce these reports and recommendations forcing the Committee of Ministers to deliver. This was what it was about, specifically when it was about the environment and the six or seven reports done: all Recommendations, unanimous. Mr DAEMS shared two reflections. Firstly, he said that the uniqueness of the Council of Europe was that it is a standards-setting organisation that was able to enforce standards through conventions or even through the basic Convention itself, allowing citizens on an individual basis to go to the Court. That was unique to the Council of Europe.

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