The history of international environmental law - Introduction to International Environmental Law - page 24

discussed discretely in textbooks. International law textbooks survey interna-
tional environmental law as if it were an entirely separate branch within
international law and politics. The Second World War, the Cold War and the
extremely rapid liberalization of world trade, especially since the World Trade
Organization (WTO) was established in 1995, have undoubtedly affected the
way international environmental policy is made.
Long before the actual international environmental protection movement
began, states and groups of states had already agreed on numerous measures to
protect individual animal species and ecosystems. The main objectives were
either the sustainable use of marine resources (mainly various fi sh and whale
species) or the conservation of animals that were useful to man. Among the fi rst
early protective measures was the 1902 Convention for the Protection of Birds
Useful to Agriculture, which is considered the fi rst multilateral environmental
treaty. 1 There were also several transboundary river treaties which included
articles on environmental protection, such as the 1909 International Boundary
Waters Treaty between the USA and Canada, for example. One early inter-
governmental environmental protection project, the International Convention
for the Prevention of Pollution of the Sea by Oil, perhaps the most ambitious
of its time, was targeted towards minimizing oil emissions into the sea in 1954.
The UN and increasing international cooperation
It is essential to consider environmental protection measures before and after
the Second World War in the context of the international politics of the time.
After the war, the focus of international politics was on the establishment of
the fi rst truly global intergovernmental organization (IGO). Having learnt
from the experiences of the war, the governments of the world established the
universal organization, the United Nations (UN), whose main objective was
to prevent wars between its member states.
The League of Nations, which operated between the World Wars, only
included some of the international community (the USA, for instance, was not
included). Although aimed at preventing wars by establishing obligations of
arbitration on states that were on the brink of war, the League of Nations did
not go so far as to prohibit war as the last resort of foreign policy or to create
a mechanism for intervention in the event of the threat of war. The UN
sought to learn from the limitations of the League of Nations and charged fi ve
permanent members of the Security Council with the maintenance of inter-
national peace and security (the USSR, the USA, France, the United Kingdom
and China). However, for a long time, the Cold War between the Soviet bloc
and the United States prevented any meaningful intervention by the UN in
wars between states.
The UN was more successful when it started promoting human rights. The
atrocities of the Second World War meant that people no longer trusted
government policy alone to shape the development of their communities, and
so the UN Charter expressing the commitment to promoting human rights