Читать книгу Industrial Environmental Management - Tapas K. Das - Страница 106

It is well known that the United Nations Conference in Stockholm on the human environment is a landmark milestone at the international arena for the protection of the deteriorating environment. The conference laid emphasis on the need that man's capabilities to transform his surroundings must be wisely used. Wrong and unwise use can do incalculable harm to human beings and the human environment. It was suggested by the Conference that developing countries must direct their efforts toward balancing their priorities with the need to check increasing population. Moreover, the conference identified the areas and laid down the principles on which the nations should take up and enact laws for protecting environment. These principles have been incorporated in the Stockholm Declaration (British Institute of International and Comparative Environmental Law 1992; Caldwell 1996; Koivurova 2014; Muralikrishna and Manickam 2017). In this process, there are national and international dimensions of environmental law.

Global and regional environmental issues are increasingly the subject of international law. Debates over environmental concerns implicate core principles of international law and have been the subject of numerous international agreements and declarations (see Appendix B).

Customary international law is an important source of international environmental law. These are the norms and rules that countries follow as a matter of custom and they are so prevalent that they bind all states in the world. When a principle becomes customary law is not clear cut and many arguments are put forward by states not wishing to be bound. Examples of customary international law relevant to the environment include the duty to warn other states promptly about icons of an environmental nature and environmental damages to which another state or states may be exposed, and Principle 21 of the Stockholm Declaration.

Numerous legally binding international agreements encompass a wide variety of issue areas, from terrestrial, marine, and atmospheric pollution through to wildlife and biodiversity protection. International environmental agreements are generally multilateral (or sometimes bilateral) treaties (a.k.a. convention, agreement, protocol, etc.). Protocols are subsidiary agreements built from a primary treaty. They exist in many areas of international law but are especially useful in the environmental field, where they may be used to regularly incorporate recent scientific knowledge. They also permit countries to reach agreement on a framework that would be contentious if every detail were to be agreed upon in advance. The most widely known protocol in international environmental law is the Kyoto Protocol, which followed from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.

While the bodies that proposed, argued, agreed upon, and ultimately adopted existing international agreements vary according to each agreement, certain conferences, including 1972s United Nations Conference on the Human Environment, 1983s World Commission on Environment and Development, 1992s United Nations Conference on Environment and Development, and 2002s World Summit on Sustainable Development have been particularly important. Multilateral environmental agreements sometimes create an International Organization, Institution, or Body responsible for implementing the agreement. Major examples are the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and the International Union for Conservation of Nature.

International environmental law also includes the opinions of international courts and tribunals. While there are few and they have limited authority, the decisions carry much weight with legal commentators and are quite influential on the development of international environmental law. One of the biggest challenges in international decisions is to determine an adequate compensation for environmental damages (Hardman Reis 2011). The courts include the International Court of Justice (ICJ), the international Tribunal for the Law of the Sea, the European Court of Justice, European Court of Human Rights, and other regional treaty tribunals.