A "clean" environment is so subjective and temporal, I don't understand how it can be a "human" right... Why does UN keep digging into this hole of irrelevancy and bs?
One could argue that the desire for an increased level of comfort of one set of people should not happen at the detriment of the right to clean water, for example, of another set of people. Many countries will have their own standards, or their own double-standards. I think it's a very relevant debate.
Hypothetically, what happens in a drought, when there is no water for anyone? Have your rights been violated? If so, by whom?
If it's rather described as a right to nondiscrimination in the distribution of clean water (with respect to some set of properties, which could include wealth or ability to pay, but likely couldn't include large-scale geographic location due to distribution logistics), then that actually starts to make sense and can be realistically debated.
Not trying to deflect, just disagreeing with the OP's comment that such debates are BS.
If the government had a reasonable way of preventing that and didn't, I'd say yes. Otherwise, no.
> If so, by whom?
By whoever was in charge of maintaining your water supply (government again), or nobody if this wasn't doable.
A government violates your rights when it fails to take action to protect them.
I know this isn't part of the Bill of Rights, but the idea that humans have a right to life isn't very controversial. If there were a situation where the water ran out in an isolated town, and the local government had a big water tower with enough clean drinking water for everyone, we'd absolutely say the people have a "right" to that water.
There are fringe cases, sure, but if people are going to literally die without a thing, and the government has the capacity to provide it, and the government is actually "by the people, of the, people for the people," I think the people have a right to that thing by extension.
The fact that there's nobody to provide it, doesn't mean that it's not a basic human right.
[0] https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
The UDHR is an aspirational document that has no legal force in and of itself.
The declaration on human rights is not really government-centric, so the US-style free speech comparison makes little sense.
> what do they really mean?
They're a yardstick to measure how well we as humanity, and, more specifically particular regions or systems, measure up to what we, as humanity, consider to be the things that every human should (expect to) have. (Sorry for the bombasity.)
For instance, if we lived in a libertarian/anarchist utopia, with no government, it would still make sense to ask whether people's human rights were being met.
Look at the debate around making Internet access a right: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_Internet_access
Same debate around free healthcare et al, which last time I checked somebody had to provide.