Vulnerability and Children’s Right to a Healthy Environment, with a Special Focus on the Hungarian Ombudsman’s Practice - Acta Universitatis Sapientiae

Acta Univ. Sapientiae, Legal Studies, 13, 2 (2024) 111–129

DOI: 10.47745/AUSLEG.2024.13.2.06

Abstract. The impact of climate change on the rights and well-being of children is an undisputed fact among human rights researchers. It poses significant challenges to the effective enjoyment of various human rights, including the rights of children as set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child (UN CRC). As a result, children’s rights scholars also deal with this complex issue. Due to their incomplete maturity, evolving capacities, and special developmental needs, children are disproportionately affected by changes in their environment, making them highly vulnerable. Factors such as poverty, minority backgrounds, and disabilities exacerbate their vulnerability. Independent children’s rights institutions (ICRIs) also play a critical role in monitoring and advancing children’s rights as human rights in the context of the environment, often in the form of an ombudsman institution. The main monitoring body of the UN CRC, the CRC Committee, in its recently adopted General Comment No.26 on children and the environment, also highlighted the importance in this field of environmental rights. Despite such calls, the ICRIs do not emphasise children’s environmental rights. This study examines the Hungarian ombudsman as a case study. This is a unique situation, as Hungary has a specialised deputy ombudsman for future generations, along with a general ombudsman with the special task of protecting children’s rights; nevertheless, evidence shows that neither of them feels any ownership of this issue.

Keywords: children’s rights, vulnerability, independent children’s rights institutions (ICRIs), ombudsman, climate change, environmental rights, Hungary, UN CRC.