Macron pledge on human environmental rights

PRESIDENT Emmanuel Macron has pledged to fight to secure a historic UN pact to protect the human right to a clean and healthy environment.

He made the promise at a meeting at Sorbonne University on Saturday, where politicians, legal experts and activists presented him with draft proposals for such a pact, to eventually be put to the United Nations for adoption.

Former UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon, and actor and climate change activist Arnold Schwarzenegger were among the VIPs at the Sorbonne for the presentation of the draft pact. The ceremony comes weeks after US President Donald Trump announced that he would pull the United States out of the Paris Agreement.

The historic 2015 agreement aims to reduce carbon emissions and contain global warming.

"We already have two international pacts (on human rights)... The idea is to create a third, for a third generation of rights - environmental rights," said president of the Constitutional Council Laurent Fabius, who chaired the 2015 UN conference that approved the Paris Agreement.

The two existing pacts on human rights provide legally-binding frameworks for social, economic and cultural rights, and for civil and political rights.