In Search of the Protection of Children’s (Environmental) Rights Within the Framework of the Constitutional Right to a Healthy Environment in Cameroon
摘要
The question I seek to explore in this chapter is whether Cameroon’s constitutional environmental framework protects children’s right to a healthy environment. In attempting to answer this question, I examine and attempt to determine how and to what extent children’s rights relate to the right to a healthy environment generally and specifically in Cameroon. The theoretical premise for this investigation is twofold. First, over the years existing scholarship on environmental rights prompted by the pursuit of the sustainable development agenda has ostensibly wrought a considerable change in the operation of environmental laws and policy, but without considerable attention to the environmental rights of children. Second, in August 2023 the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the ChildUnited Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child adopted General Comments 26 on Children’s Rights and the Environment with a specific focus on climate change, as a way of clarifying that children’s environmental rights deserve adequate protection. I argue that these developments provide the leverage for questioning the status quo of children’s environmental protection and making a persuasive understanding of the implications on domestic legal regimes such as Cameroon. It also provides the platform for measuring compliance with environmental protection measures and for recalibrating the much-needed efforts to strengthen the protection of children’s environmental rights. Furthermore, based on the international principle of equality and non-discriminationinternational principle of equality and non-discrimination and the 3 ‘Ps’, I articulate ways of implementing the constitutional environmental rights in Cameroon to include and benefit children’s environmental rights and interests. I argue that it would be legally unjustified and academically dishonest to disallow the protection of children’s environmental rights on the flimsy ground of its lack of explicit provision in constitutional and legislative environmental frameworks.