International Environmental Law

International Environmental Law Governance

The UN Environment Assembly - the highest-level UN body ever convened on the environment - opened on 23 June 2014 at the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) headquarters in Nairobi. UNEA feeds directly into the General Assembly and has universal membership of all 193 UN member states as well as other stakeholder groups. With this wide reach into the legislative, financial and development arenas, the new body presents a ground-breaking platform for leadership on global environmental policy.

Key Declarations & Treaties 

Declarations

Two major declarations on international environmental law are:

1. The Declaration of the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (the 1972 Stockholm Declaration) (UN Doc. A/CONF/48/14/REV.1 (1972). This declaration represented a first major attempt at considering the global human impact on the environment, and an international attempt to address the challenge of preserving and enhancing the human environment. The Stockholm Declaration espouses mostly broad environmental policy goals and objectives rather than detailed normative positions. The UN website provides introductory information, procedural history and preparatory documents associated with the Declaration, as well as the full text of the Declaration.
2. The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development  (UN Doc. A/CONF.151/26 (vol. I))  was a short document produced at the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED), known as the Rio Earth Summit. The Rio Declaration consists of 27 principles intended to guide future sustainable development around the world. 

In 2012 the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit was commemorated by the Rio+20 UN Conference on Sustainable Development.

A useful and concise summary of the importance and impact of the Stockholm and Rio declarations can be found on the UN website.

Treaties

Customary law and general principles relating to the environment, such as the 'precautionary principle' and sustainable development, are evolving but it is arguable whether any have yet become normative rules. The speed with which awareness of global environmental problems has reached the international political agenda has meant that customary law has tended to take second place to treaty law in the evolution of legal norms, and treaties have been the main method by which the international community has responded to the need to regulate activities which threaten the environment. There are hundreds of bilateral and multilateral environmental treaties creating states' rights and obligations. The UN Environment Program (UNEP) and the UN Commission on Sustainable Development have negotiated many of these treaties. 

A full list of international environmental law treaties can be found on Wikipedia. This is arranged alphabetically and also by subject.

A few major treaties are listed below, but the full text of all IEL treaties can be found on:

• ECOLEX, a free online gateway to environmental law treaties; and
• ENTRI (Environmental Treaties and Resource Indicators)  - the Treaty Locator allows sophisticated searching of the full text of all treaties. ENTRI also contains treaty status information.

Treaties generally concern one of the following broad subjects:  toxic and hazardous substances, nuclear damage, ocean and marine sources, ozone and protection of the atmosphere, pollution, biodiversity and the protection and conservation of species and wildlife, sustainable development, and trade and the environment. The Globalex Guide on International Environmental Legal Research provides a useful table of these subjects together with links to the agreements and relevant agencies. Descriptions of the major environmental treaties by subject can also be found on the ILO website.

Many of the major treaties have their own websites, containing convention documentation such as backgrounds to the conventions, draft articles and travaux preparatoires, convention protocols and national reports.

 The UN Audiovisual Library of International Law website lists the following major IEL treaties, and provides the full text of the treaties and travaux, together with useful introductory summaries:

• Vienna Convention for the Protection of the Ozone Layer, 1985, and Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, 1987
• Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Wastes and their Disposal, 1989
• Convention on Biological Diversity, 1992, and Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity, 2000
• United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1992 (UNFCCC)
  • UNFCCC website
• Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 1997
  • Kyoto Protocol website
• United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification in those Countries Experiencing Serious Drought and/or Desertification, Particularly in Africa, 1994 (UNCCD)
  • UNCCD website
• Convention on the Law of the Non-Navigational Uses of International Watercourses, 1997

Treaties to which Australia is a party - free full-text treaties

The Australian Treaty Database on the DFAT website can be searched by subject and lists all environmental treaties to which Australia is a party, as well as information about the treaty process and adoption into domestic law.

The Australian Treaty Series on AustLII contains Environment and Resources Treaties, which can be searched or browsed by subject.

Finding IEL Treaties 

The full text of all IEL treaties can be found on the following open access platforms:

• ECOLEX; 
• ENTRI (Environmental Treaties and Resource Indicators)  - the Treaty Locator allows sophisticated searching of the full text of all treaties. ENTRI also contains treaty status information; and

• The International Environmental Agreements (IEA) Database Project, hosted by the University of Oregon, describes more than 3,700 international environmental treaties, conventions, and other agreements from the 1850s to the present. It includes detailed pages for each agreement, which links to text, membership, performance data, secretariat, and summary statistics. The database can be searched and browsed by title, date, subject, lineage etc. It also lists relevant secondary sources by topic.

Environmental Performance Index 

NASA's Environmental Treaties and Resources Indicators database contain comprehensive information on country participation in multilateral environmental agreements up until August 2012. The database has a sophisticated search engine which can be interrogated using multiple criteria.