The Right to healthy environment
ENPeople’s health greatly depends on the environment they live in. The condition of health is determined by many environmental factors - water, air, soil, etc. The quality of the latter environmental components is determined by a number of factors - business operations of industrial and energy companies, agriculture, tourism, transport and pollution caused by it, planning and infrastructure of housing developments, waste of anthropogenic activities and its treatment, natural environmental characteristics. In implementation of the right to healthy environment it is important to ensure establishment of tough pollution standards, to control their observation as well as to bring actions of damages against violators. The measures to guarantee the right to healthy environment are not regulated by the legal acts in a consistent manner. Neither the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania nor laws clearly define the content of the rights to healthy environment. That can be done through systemizing the provisions of different legal acts. Paragraph 1 of Article 53 of the Constitution of the Republic of Lithuania establishes that the State shall take care of people’s health, paragraph 3 of the same Article says that the State and each individual must protect the environment from harmful influences; Article 54 establishes that the State shall take concern of the protection of natural environment, its fauna and flora, separate objects of the nature and particularly valuable districts, and shall supervise sustainable unitization as well as renewal and augmentation of natural resources. The exhaustion of the land and entrails of the earth, pollution of waters and air, production of a radioactive impact as well as impoverishing of the fauna and flora shall be prohibited by law.Article 2 of the Law of the Republic of Lithuania on Environmental Protection establishes that the law shall regulate public relations in the environmental protection field, define the main rights and duties of legal and natural persons ensuring amongst other healthy and clean environment. Article 1 of the Law of the Republic of Lithuania on Public Health Care indicates that the law establishes the foundations of public health safety and control. The principal institutions ensuring the right of Lithuanian people to healthy environment are as follows: the Ministry of Environment of the Republic of Lithuania, the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Lithuania as well as institutions under them, other Ministries of the Republic of Lithuania (the Ministry of Transport and Communications, the Ministry of the Interior, etc.) and municipal institutions. Various strategic plans, action programmes and other documents of the institutions give rather significant attention to the measures ensuring the right to healthy environment. For example, as one of the key commitments of the coalition Government for 2004-2008 established by Resolution No. X-43 of the Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania on the Programme of the Government of the Republic of Lithuania of 14 December 2004 is to harmonize the laws regulating economic development and environmental protection with the priorities for health protection and its strengthening.The right to healthy environment is also entrenched in the Lithuanian Environmental Protection Strategy, the Lithuanian Health Programme, the National Public Health Care Strategy of Lithuania, the Plan of Strategic Activities 2004-2006 of the Ministry of Environment of the Republic of Lithuania, the Plan of Strategic Activities 2003-2005 of the Ministry of Health of the Republic of Lithuania, the National Action Programme for Environmental Health Promotion. However, the real state of environmental factors and public health as well as their development have to show whether the measures provided for in these programmes and objectives are implemented in an appropriate manner [p. 176-177].
