Africa is one of three regions where international law provides for participatory rights in environmental matters through a combination of environmental treaties and human rights regimes. Compared to the legal frameworks of Europe and Latin America, the African treaty regimes are much less detailed on what the rights to access to information, public participation, and access to justice in environmental matters imply. The African Commission and Court of Human and Peoples’ Rights confirm that the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights bestow participatory rights in environmental matters to individuals and peoples, but the jurisprudence is surprisingly limited and does not clarify what these rights amount to. While the revised African Convention on the Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (Maputo Convention) affirms the rights to access to information, public participation, and access to justice in environmental contexts, it has no effective institutional backing, and appears as a “sleeping treaty.” For the participatory rights in the African Charter and Maputo Convention to be powerful tools to protect the environment and not “sleeping rights,” they must be invoked, claimed, and enforced in practice.

The 1972 UN Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment (UNCHE) was ahead of its time in asserting that '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'. Fifty years later, at Stockholm+50, the human rights approach to environment protection has been significantly consolidated in international law and governance. The article describes and reflects on these developments from the 1972 Stockholm Conference to the 2022 Stockholm Meeting. The consolidation of the human rights approach to environment protection results from normative advances at regional and global scales, further world summits on environment and sustainable development, international treaty-making to protect the environment and human rights, international policy documents and declarations, and remarkable jurisprudential developments. In parallel, fundamental rights relating to the environment have also been recognised in numerous national constitutions and laws. While the human rights approach is not a panacea to resolve all environmental concerns, and to ascertain due concerns for non-human species and interests that are not directly linked to human well-being, it is a key to ensure that no one is left behind in the pursuit for sustainable development and prosperity.

The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), Agenda 2030, and international law interact in multifaceted and complex ways. On the one hand, neither Agenda 2030 nor the SDGs fundamentally question the role of the international economic system, which is entrenched in international law and supportive of activities that do not necessarily further sustainable development. On the other hand, Agenda 2030 aims to transform our world, by evoking a bold cosmopolitan understanding of sustainable development, so that no one is left behind. This cosmopolitan understanding of sustainable development should inspire the application and development of international law, if indeed no one is to be left behind. International law offers ample opportunities for implementing such an approach to sustainable development.