Abstract
Abstract:This article provides a normative account of sovereign rights to natural resources on the basis of moral principles which underlie its international legal structure – the right to self-determination and human rights. The first part locates the emergence of the system of sovereign rights to natural resources in the process of the decolonisation and justifies it as a correction of historical injustice of violent appropriation of natural resources. The second part identifies the key moral component and justificatory principle of the system of sovereign rights to natural resources – the right to self-determination. I outline a justice-based interpretation of the right to self-determination and show why rights to natural resources are its corollary. The last part connects rights to self-determination and rights to natural resources to human rights and shows how human rights define the permissible scope of rights to natural resources in two dimensions – the dimension of political legitimacy of the exercise of resource rights and the dimension of the distribution of resource benefits.
Highlights
Long neglected by critical and normative theorising, natural resources have recently become subject to an increased scrutiny in an ever-expanding field of the philosophy of justice
A common and dominant feature of the available conceptions of natural resource justice is that rights to them are construed exclusively as purely moral rights – rights individuals or collectives have as an implication of a general moral principle or a principle of justice which is to be justified independently of existing institutions, relations, or legal structures
I side with Buchanan that the mirroring view is a problematic methodological assumption; and I hold that the exclusive focus on moral rights to natural resources is impractical and morally and epistemologically restrictive
Summary
The system of permanent sovereignty over natural resources in which sovereign rights over natural resources belong to all states and their people is relatively new. Even if territories were already occupied, settlers automatically acquired property rights to lands and resources and gained governmental, political, and commercial rights over the native inhabitants.[21] The freedom of navigation, trade and commerce defended by Europeans as universal rules of natural law justified the practice of enforcing nonreciprocal and asymmetrical treaties, concessions, and contracts which granted extensive and exclusive extraterritorial powers over people, property, and resources to European sovereigns, trading companies, or even private individuals.[22] These legal and political regimes and technologies were designed to justify and enable the domination over distant people and the exploitation of their natural resources. 16 petra gümplová individuals to unjustly appropriate or dispossess natural resources occurring on distant territories of other peoples and populations To correct this global colonial system, it allocated sovereign rights to natural resources to territorial collectives, providing them a legal tool against foreign companies or powers and their efforts to exploit resources for their own benefit and to establish extensive property rights not subjected to regulation by local jurisdictions. The possibility to link the right to self-determination to human rights will enable to specify the permissible scope of sovereignty over natural resources and the procedural and substantive principles of justice inherent in it
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