27 May 2013
Symposium on the Law of the Sea and the Law of Responsibility, cross-posted on Opinio Juris
Natalie Klein has drawn attention to a longstanding weakness in those fields of international law, including international environmental law, devoted to serve collective interests, in matching obligations with rules of responsibility for their breach. The law of state responsibility applies in a fairly straightforward way to situations where there is an obligation under a treaty to protect the environment, that is violated by a treaty party, with clear impacts upon another party. However, as Klein points out, when it comes to iconic whale and shark (and indeed other) species found on the high seas the responsibility situation may be far from straightforward, and this can frustrate efforts to enforce conservation rules. (more…)
27 May 2013
Symposium on the Law of the Sea and the Law of Responsibility, cross-posted on Opinio Juris
One of the most successful environmental campaigns was captured by the slogan of ‘Save the Whales’. It was apparently when the Australian Prime Minister’s daughter returned home from school sporting a Save the Whales badge that the initial impetus was provided for Australia to shift from pro-whaling nation to anti-whaling. Over the decades, we have seen a fundamental change in the legal regulation of whaling: from minimal regulation and maximum exploitation to a zero-catch quota (colloquially known as the moratorium) on commercial whaling under the International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling (ICRW). There has been resistance to this moratorium – from those states that never agreed to the imposition of a moratorium and those states that seem to thwart the moratorium by conducting commercial whaling under the guise of legally permissible scientific whaling, as Australia asserts Japan is doing. If we are to maintain legal standards in the conduct of whaling then how can states be held responsible? (more…)