Enacting and developing international environmental law - Introduction to International Environmental Law - page 57

Wording of agreements
Parties to modern environmental treaties tend to specify in increasingly specifi c
detail how the terms are to be understood, thus decreasing states' power to inter-
pret them in such a narrow way as to minimize their obligations. For the same
reason, most environmental treaties do not accept reservations. 15
On the other hand, most environmental treaties are relatively weak; they do
not prescribe an obligation to compensate for environmental damage or require
compulsory dispute settlement between the parties in the event of disagreement.
Many of the articles were negotiated to be so vague that they only constituted a
very open-ended obligation.

Institutional framework
Up until the 1970s, it was considered suffi cient to establish substantive obliga-
tions in international legal agreements without any follow-up or enforcement
mechanisms. The representative of a state would negotiate a treaty and return
to their country to have it ratifi ed, and the expectation was that states would
dutifully observe the treaty according to the principle pacta sunt servanda ('agree-
ments must be honoured'). An example of such an agreement was and remains
the 1974 Nordic Convention on the Protection of the Environment (NEPC)
between Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. Under this convention,
these four Nordic countries guaranteed that the authorities and citizens in each
other's states would be able to participate in any administrative and judicial
proceedings related to a proposed project, if that project should have trans-
boundary environmental impact. No meetings of the parties were established to
monitor the implementation and application of the convention.
During the 1970s, this kind of attitude to environmental treaties was gradu-
ally abandoned as ineffective. In its place, a new model became the main
standard:

1 At the negotiation stage, an article is created establishing a regular 'meet-
ing of the parties' (sometimes called the 'conference of the parties', which
represents all the states' parties), which has the authority to develop a
treaty regime. A funding model for the operation of the treaty regime is
also designed at this stage.

2 These meetings of the parties, consisting of representatives of each state,

defi ne how the treaty regime is to be developed and what, if any, treaty
bodies should be established. At the meetings of the parties all the decisions
in the agreement system are generally made by consensus (i.e. no state should
be specifi cally in opposition). 16

3 The meeting of the parties establishes a mechanism for monitoring com-

pliance with the treaty (the implementation committee or compliance
committee), usually consisting of a small number of delegates representing