Ensuring Compliance With Multilateral Environmental Agreements – Systems Of Inspection And External Monitoring

Abstract

Systems of inspection and external monitoring are part of a larger and crucial phenomenon in international relations, namely ascertaining facts, more commonly known as fact finding. This chapter sets the general scene of different procedures to ascertain facts and presents the examples of systems of inspection and external monitoring. It then focuses on environmental law. If one analyses the procedures existing in the field of international environmental law, the absence of external monitoring and inspection systems of the kind just described is striking. Compliance with multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) is less top-down than the regime established for arms control and disarmament. The differences between the system of inspection and external monitoring, for which the law of arms control is still a lonely example, and the compliance regimes established by MEAs are not really surprising. They can be explained by the different nature and structure of the regulatory problems involved. Keywords: compliance regimes; external monitoring system; inspection systems; international environmental law; multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs)