What Do Toxics Have To Do With Your Human Rights?

The UN Special Rapporteur on human rights and hazardous substances and wastes, Baskut Tuncak, joins us for our latest episode of “On Human Rights.” “Toxic pollution is quite possibly, very likely, the leading cause of premature preventive death in the world, so the World Health Organization estimates that it’s almost 13 million people per year who die prematurely from diseases that are linked to an unhealthy environment,” he says. His work is informally known as the UN Human Rights Council’s mandate on "toxics.” Tuncak is a visiting scholar at American University's Washington College of Law in Washington, D.C. He is also an affiliated researcher with the Raoul Wallenberg Institute.