Stockholm Declaration.

In 1968, the notion of holding an international conference on the environment was brought to the fore by the United Nations Economic and Social Council at its forty-fifth session. A council resolution underscored the immediate need for intensified action at the national and the international levels to contain and, if possible, halt the continuous deterioration of the human environment. The U.N. General Assembly, at its twenty-third session, endorsed the council’s recommendations. As a result, the Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment was convened on June 5-16, 1972, in Stockholm, Sweden. The importance of the Stockholm conference was threefold: It was the first global conference on the human environment; it was the predecessor of the first U.N. Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) in 1992; and it acknowledged the need to articulate “third generation human rights,” those that go beyond the merely civil and social. Such rights are legally difficult to enact, but the conference endorsed them in the Stockholm Declaration, which recognized a human right to a “healthy environment.”