Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law: Introduction

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 571-572 ◽  
Author(s):  
KISHAN KHODAY ◽  
VANESSA LAMB ◽  
TYLER MCCREARY ◽  
KARIN MICKELSON ◽  
USHA NATARAJAN ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Sustainable Livelihoods ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
Behavioural Patterns ◽  
The World

Environmental harm is of increasing concern to peoples and states all over the world, whether in relation to ensuring access to healthy air, water, food, and sustainable livelihoods, or coping with the diversity of challenges posed by changing climates and ecologies. While international lawyers have focused on crafting solutions to environmental problems, less attention is paid to the disciplinary role in fostering harmful and unsustainable behavioural patterns. Environmental issues are usually relegated to the specialized field of international environmental law. This project explores instead the role of nature in the general discipline, arguing that the natural environment is a determinative factor in shaping international law, and that assumptions about nature lie at the heart of disciplinary concepts such as sovereignty, development, economy, property, and human rights.

Locating Nature: Making and Unmaking International Law

2014 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 573-593 ◽  
Author(s):  
USHA NATARAJAN ◽  
KISHAN KHODAY
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
Wealth Generation ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis article explores the relationship between international law and the natural environment. We contend that international environmental law and general international law are structured in ways that systemically reinforce ecological harm. Through exploring the cultural milieu from which international environmental law emerged, we argue it produced an impoverished understanding of nature that is incapable of responding adequately to ecological crises. We maintain that environmental issues should not be confined to a disciplinary specialization because humanity's relationship with nature has been central to making international law. Foundational concepts such as sovereignty, development, property, economy, human rights, and so on, have evolved through understanding nature in ways that are unsuited to perceiving or observing ecological limits. International law primarily sees nature as a resource for wealth generation to enable societies to continually develop, and environmental degradation is treated as an economic externality to be managed by special regimes. Through tracing the co-evolution of these assumptions about nature alongside seminal disciplinary concepts, it becomes evident that such understandings are central to shaping international law and that the discipline helps universalize and normalize them. By comprehending more broadly the relationship between nature and international law, it is possible to see beyond law's potential to correct environmental harm and identify the disciplinary role in driving ecological degradation. Venturing beyond the purview of international environmental lawyers, this article considers the role of all international lawyers in augmenting and mitigating ecological crises. It concludes that disciplinary solutions to environmental problems require radical departures from existing disciplinary tenets, necessitating new formulations that encapsulate rich and diverse understandings of nature.

scholarly journals TRANSBOUNDARY ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION: UNDERSTANDING THE INTRICACIES OF INTERNATIONAL LAW

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kshitij Bansal
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Academic Discipline ◽  
Scientific Information ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
International Agencies ◽  
The World ◽  
International Environmental Problems ◽  
Legal Controls

Faced with the enormity and urgency of international environmental problems the world has experienced a political awakening. Although environmental issues are not new for international relations, world leaders have increasingly brought environmental issues from the sidelines to the centre of their negotiation agendas. International conferences and treaties regarding global warming and ozone depletion are but few signs that the world has entered a new age of environmental diplomacy in which environmental issues will share centre-stage with more traditional economic and military concerns. In response to this concern governments, legislatures, and the courts have produced a labyrinth of draft bills, amendments to existing legislation, regulations, drafts of international treaties, and judicial decisions, all creating legal controls of pollution. In order to ascertain scientific information and technological data royal commissions, presidential enquiries, governmental departments, and international agencies have undertaken extensive research programs. Paralleling these developments, international environmental law has started to become a new and an emerging academic discipline. A growing number of commentators, diplomats, and practitioners are concentrating on transboundary and global environmental issues. There has also been a significant increase in the number of law schools all over the world that have started focussing towards this subject. The regime of international environmental law is mainly composed of treaties, customs; general principles of international law and opinio juris. In an attempt to use customary international law to protect the environment, commentators have spent the last two decades in elaborating the rules of state responsibility and liability specifically to address the issues related to transboundary pollution. States have begun to build on this liability regime towards the development of international agreements designed to prevent harmful environmental activity.

The Oxford Handbook of International Environmental Law

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Armed Conflict ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Hazardous Substances ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
Diverse Range ◽  
Important Field

The second edition of this leading reference work provides a comprehensive discussion of the dynamic and important field of international law concerned with environmental protection. The handbook discusses the key principles underpinning international environmental law, its relevant actors and tools, and rules applying in its substantive sub-fields such as climate law, oceans law, wildlife and biodiversity law, and hazardous substances regulation. It also explores the intersection of international environmental law with other areas of international law, such as those concerned with trade, investment, disaster, migration, armed conflict, intellectual property, energy, and human rights. The handbook sets its discussion of international environmental law in the broader interdisciplinary context of developments in science, ethics, politics, and economics, which inform the way in which environmental rules are made, implemented, and enforced. It provides an introduction to the foundations of international environmental law while also engaging with questions at the frontiers of research, teaching, and practice in the field, including the role of global South perspectives, the contribution made by Earth jurisprudence, and the growing role of a diverse range of actors from Indigenous peoples to business and industry. It is an essential reference text for all engaged with environmental issues at the international level and the applicable governance and regulatory structures.

International Environmental Law

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Donald K. Anton
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Complex Relationship ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
Customary International Law ◽  
Progressive Development ◽  
The World ◽  
International Law Commission ◽  
Law Commission

International custom “as evidence of a general practice accepted as law”, is considered one of the two main sources of international law as it primarily derives from the conduct of sovereign States, but is also closely connected with the role of the international judge when identifying the applicable customary rule, a function it shares with the bodies in charge of its codification (and progressive development), starting with the International Law Commission. Though mainly considered to be general international law, international custom has a complex relationship with many specific fields of law and specific regions of the world. The editor provides comprehensive research published in the last seven decades, invaluable to everyone interested in the field of customary international law.

scholarly journals INTERNATIONAL ENVIRONMENTAL LAW AND GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL GOVERNANCE: SOUTHERN INFLUENCES.

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (32) ◽  
pp. 143-165
Author(s):  
Fernando Cardozo Fernandes Rei
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Environmental Governance ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Global Environmental Governance ◽  
Sustainable Society ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
Scientific Expertise

The purpose of this article when it discusses the southern approaches brought to global governance gets mixed with the addressing of the challenges facing the legal science in harmony with the others sciences to deal with the complex environmental issues of the 21st century. Thinking of a successful international environmental regulation is talking about an effort to understand the need for the instrumental law to comply with its role to solve complex issues that are typical of the construction of a sustainable society. The first part of the article consider that the international environmental law has been facing the emerging global environmental issues in an innovating way, incorporating a new form of global environmental governance based on which new players are brought to the discussion and implementation of measures to face environmental problems. After that, the article highlights the southern actions in the role of the scientific expertise and in the environmental paradiplomacy, and evaluates the influence and contributions in the decision making scenario and in the news perspectives of international law. The article concludes that the southern influences suggest a more pragmatic, finalistic international law that is concerned about the results, the achievement of the goals proposed

scholarly journals Exploring the connection between indigenous peoples’ human rights and international environmental law

2018 ◽  
pp. 92-153
Author(s):  
Mario Alejandro Delgado Galárraga
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
Environmental Rights ◽  
The Relationship

The paper reviews whether Indigenous Peoples’ worldview has directly influenced or not the decisions made by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights related exclusively to their human and environmental rights. In the first section of the investigation, it is described the main aspects to take into consideration regarding Indigenous Peoples and international law; i.e. conceptualization of the term Indigenous Peoples, its evolution in international law, and their core rights. Then, the text will deal with the relationship between Human Rights Law and International Environmental Law, through the discussion of how human rights have been included in the context of international environmental law. Afterwards, the study will explore the close bond that exists between indigenous peoples and the environment, by relating to the different conceptions of its features according to them. Finally, the paper will analyse the decisions taken by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in cases related to indigenous peoples’ environmental issues. The conclusion will lead to determine the contribution of human rights and international environmental law to solve indigenous peoples’ controversies and vice versa.

Part III Conceptual Pillars, Ch.16 Harm Prevention

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brunnée Jutta
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Law ◽  
Environmental Harm ◽  
Due Diligence ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
Significant Harm ◽  
Actual Harm ◽  
The Face ◽  
Harm Prevention ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter addresses how international environmental law originates from and revolves around the harm prevention rule. It focuses on three points of contention, each related to the role of due diligence in harm prevention, and each highlighted by recent judicial engagements with the harm prevention rule. First, it is generally accepted that a state's obligation to prevent environmental harm is not absolute, but requires due diligence in the face of risk of significant harm. However, it is unclear whether a failure to act diligently to avert harm on its own—absent actual harm—can amount to a breach of the harm prevention rule. Second, the relationship between the procedural and substantive dimensions of the harm prevention rule remains ambiguous. Third, there is some uncertainty as to where the line runs between the harm prevention obligation and the precautionary principle, given the focus of both notions on risk. These inter-related conceptual questions affect the harm prevention rule's function as a reference point for international environmental law.

Part IX International Environmental Law in National/Regional Courts, Ch.65 North America

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Affolder Natasha
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Human Rights ◽  
North America ◽  
International Law ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
The United States ◽  
Private International Law ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
Indigenous Law

This chapter assesses international environmental law in the courts of North America. In particular, it explores the minimal engagement of US, Canadian, and Mexican courts with international environmental law. Environmental law cases in Canada, Mexico, and the United States are not immune to international law and international norms. However, international environmental lawyers may be forced to look to some unlikely and unusual places to find international environmental law's normative influence. Environmental law cases in North America seem poised to engage most significantly with international law not in the ‘bright lights’ but rather on the side-lines, where environmental law norms interface with climate law, private international law, Indigenous law, and human rights law.

New Ways to Make International Environmental Law

1992 ◽  
Vol 86 (2) ◽  
pp. 259-283 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Palmer
Keyword(s):  
United Nations ◽  
International Law ◽  
Environmental Degradation ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
Political Will ◽  
Environmental Challenges ◽  
The World ◽  
Environment And Development

The purpose of this article is to suggest new ways to make international law for the environment. The existing methods are slow, cumbersome, expensive, uncoordinated and uncertain. Something better must be found if the environmental challenges the world faces are to be dealt with successfully. Nearly twenty years after the Stockholm Declaration, we still lack the institutional and legal mechanisms to deal effectively with transboundary and biospheric environmental degradation. The 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development presents an opportunity to make progress. Unfortunately, my reading of the situation in late 1991 suggests that there is no political will to take decisions that will give us the tools to do the job.

scholarly journals Due Diligence in International Environmental Law and International Human Rights Law: A Comparative Legal Study of the Nationally Determined Contributions under the Paris Agreement and Positive Obligations under the European Convention on Human Rights

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Medes Malaihollo
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
International Law ◽  
Environmental Law ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
International Human Rights Law ◽  
Due Diligence ◽  
Human Rights Law ◽  
International Human Rights ◽  
International Environmental Law ◽  
International Human

AbstractDue diligence is a frequently employed notion in international law, yet much is still to be explored about this concept. This article aims to contribute to an understanding of due diligence obligations in international law, which is useful as it can form the basis for a further clarification of corresponding legal rights of subjects of international law. With this purpose in mind, this article initiates the construction of a working model of due diligence in international law by exploring this notion from two perspectives: an accountability perspective and a regulatory perspective. Subsequently, this article will use this model to compare the operation of due diligence obligations in two branches of international law: international environmental law and international human rights law. In doing so, it will become clear that due diligence contains two core elements: ‘reasonableness’ and ‘good faith’. Moreover, it will become apparent that the operation of due diligence obligations in these two branches has implications for systemic issues in international law. Further research on the operation of due diligence obligations in other branches of international law is therefore recommended.

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