The Right to Happiness in light of Sustainable Development Goals

Happiness is considered a measure of countries' development level, in the sense that the realization of human happiness passes through development. Accordingly, being kept away from the pursuit of happiness has prompted the UN to set sustainable development goals as a comprehensive roadmap and an action plan for realizing the right to happiness within four categories namely social, economic, social health and lifestyle development. In so doing, states' planning and development policies should be framed in such a way that the social and economic ground is laid for people to realize happiness. With such importance and necessity, understanding the meaning of the right to happiness in the light of sustainable development goals, the legal nature of this right in respect of legal foundations and documents as well as the relation between right to happiness and sustainable development goals constitutes the main idea and problem of this article. This article investigates this subject matter on the basis of a descriptive-analytical method and library studies. The result would be that the positive sustainable development approach can be a reliable avenue toward the right to happiness, which is subject to many requirements and instruments in the scope of social, economic, social health and lifestyle development.