The International Law Of Pollution

Waste management poses increasing challenges to both the protection of the environment and to human health. To face these challenges, this book claims that environmental law needs to shift attention from media-specific pollution regimes to integrative life-cycle approaches of waste management i.e., from the prevention of waste generation to the actual handling of wastes. Furthermore, the cooperation of States and the establishment of coordinated activities is essential because states can no longer have separate standards for wastes posing transboundary risks and for ‘purely domestic’ wastes. Drawing upon both International and EU law, the book provides a detailed analysis of the regimes set up to deal with the transboundary movement of wastes and ship-source pollution, so as to elucidate the obligations and legal principles governing such regimes. It concludes that treaty obligations concerning transboundary movements of wastes are inapplicable to ship wastes while on board ships and on land. However, despite the limitations of the transboundary movement of wastes regime, the principle of Environmentally Sound Management (ESM) embodied in this regime has gradually transformed into a legal principle. ESM works to address the legal gaps in the regulation of wastes, and consequently, it provides the desired coherence to the legal system since it acts as a bridge between several regulatory and sectoral levels. Furthermore, ESM offers a new light with which to understand and interpret existing obligations, and it provides a renewed impetus to regimes that directly and indirectly govern wastes. This impetus translates into greater coordination and the establishment of cross-sectional policies. By offering alternative ways to solve problems linked to the management of ship wastes in the sea-land interface, this book will appeal to anyone with an interest in International Environmental Law.

This important new book provides a comprehensive overview of the international legal principles governing transboundary pollution. In doing so, the experts writing in this book examine the practical applications of the State responsibility doctrine in

Assessing the basic principles, structure and effectiveness of the international legal system concerning the protection of the world's natural environment, this text has been updated to take account of developments in genetically modified organisms and biotechnology.

At present there is no clear model under international law with which to determine compensation for environmental damage. After showing that no existing standard of compensation defined by the theory and practice of international law is adequate to cover all cases involving environmental damages - and that such a broad standard or set of standards may in fact be ultimately unachievable - the author of this important book develops a 'fair compensation' regime from an analysis of existing international dispute adjudication mechanisms, and presents this model as the best possible current approach to the conciliation of international responsibility and environmental interests.

This book focuses on how public and private international law address civil liability for transboundary pollution. In public international law, civil liability treaties promote the implementation of minimum procedural standards in domestic tort law. This approach implicitly relies on private international law to facilitate civil litigation against transboundary polluters. Yet this connection remains poorly understood. Filling the gap, this book engages in a meaningful dialogue between the two areas and explores how domestic private international law can reflect the policies developed in international environmental law. It begins with an investigation of civil liability in international environmental law. It then identifies preferable rules of civil jurisdiction, foreign judgments and choice of law for environmental damage, using Canadian private international law as a case study and making extensive references to European law. Liability for transboundary pollution is a contentious issue of the law, both in scholarship and practice: international lawyers both private and public as well as environmental lawyers will welcome this important work.