Handl, G. (2012). Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm Declaration), 1972 and the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development, 1992. United Nations Audiovisual Library of International Law, 11.

Introduction

The Stockholm and Rio Declarations are outputs of the first and second global environmental conferences, respectively, namely the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm, June 5-16, 1972, and the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in Rio de Janeiro, June 3-14, 1992. Other policy or legal instruments that emerged from these conferences, such as the Action Plan for the Human Environment at Stockholm and Agenda 21 at Rio, are intimately linked to the two declarations, conceptually as well as politically. However, the declarations, in their own right, represent signal achievements. Adopted twenty years apart, they undeniably represent major milestones in the evolution of international environmental law, bracketing what has been called the “modern era” of international environmental law (Sand, pp. 33-35).

Stockholm represented a first taking stock of the global human impact on the environment, an attempt at forging a basic common outlook on how to address the challenge of preserving and enhancing the human environment. As a result, the Stockholm Declaration espouses mostly broad environmental policy goals and objectives rather than detailed normative positions. However, following Stockholm, global awareness of environmental issues increased dramatically, as did international environmental law-making proper. At the same time, the focus of international environmental activism progressively expanded beyond transboundary and global commons issues to media-specific and cross-sectoral regulation and the synthesizing of economic and development considerations in environmental decision-making. By the time of the Rio Conference, therefore, the task for the international community became one of systematizing and restating existing normative expectations regarding the environment, as well as of boldly positing the legal and political underpinnings of sustainable development. In this vein, UNCED was expected to craft an “Earth Charter”, a solemn declaration on legal rights and obligations bearing on environment and development, in the mold of the United Nations General Assembly’s 1982 World Charter for Nature (General Assembly resolution 37/7). Although the compromise text that emerged at Rio was not the lofty document originally envisaged, the Rio Declaration, which reaffirms and builds upon the Stockholm Declaration, has nevertheless proved to be a major environmental legal landmark.