Since 1972 the United Nations (UN) promotes global meetings to discuss issues related to the environment. The permanence of this issue on the political agenda of the UN, however, does not mean that the notions of the environment, nature and ecology have remained the same. In this article we reflect on the production of the idea of environmental rights as human rights. We analyse materials from some of the United Nations Conferences on the Environment and also of national conferences on human rights. After discussing the principle of "defense of life", the idea of environmental justice and, finally, the emergence of some bureaucratic mechanisms for reporting environmental crimes, we establish some of the key linkages between human rights and environmental rights in Brazil.
enviromental rights; global meetings; human rights; United Nations