Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
They gave the environmental problem a human face and reminded the state
negotiators of the injustice of emitting POP compounds: for example, victims
included pregnant Inuit women living in an area where POP compounds are
not even produced. Since effectively it was the foetuses of the Inuit women that
would suffer from transboundary POPs pollution, the indigenous groups managed
to present the environmental problem as an issue of intergenerational injustice.
The coalition between the scientifi c community and the indigenous peoples
was possible because these actor groups had already previously collaborated
through the activities of the Arctic Council.
The influence of international environmental law
The need for international law and regulation is obvious, but we should also
ask ourselves whether these rules are effective. This is a matter of great debate,
with certain schools of international relations alleging that rules in international
politics have hardly any bearing.
As there is no global state, what incentives are there for governments to
keep the promises they have made each other in a treaty? Many people think
that governments' foreign policies are a mixture of self-defence and pursuit for
power, infl uenced by factors such as the size of the country, its resources,
military power and population.
This perspective tends to forget that even if there is no global state, it is the
states themselves that create the rules of international law. It can be presumed
that if states themselves create the rules via their explicit (treaty) or implicit
(customary law) consent, we should also be able to expect that they would feel
compelled to follow them.
National implementation of international environmental law
National implementation of international environmental law is a precondition
for international environmental law to be effective and have any global infl uence.
Only nation-states have the requisite legislative and enforcement powers to fully
implement the obligations of international environmental law, even if other
actors can be of some assistance.
In many states, international environmental law rules are 'internalized' as
part of their domestic legal order. If the civil servants and the judiciary are
accustomed to applying and administering only national legal rules, it stands to
reason that international environmental rules will be better observed if they are
fi rst made part of the domestic legal order. There are no clear-cut dualist or
monist systems, but it is possible to pin down the basic characteristics of a
system: in some states (such as the United Kingdom) rules such as international
treaties must be incorporated as part of national law or they are not legally
binding domestically, while in others international law rules almost automatically
become part of national law (the Netherlands, for example).
 
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