Abstract
In May 2018, the United Nations General Assembly adopted the resolution “Towards a Global Pact for the Environment”. This resolution established an intergovernmental working group to discuss the opportunity to open treaty negotiations to codify the fundamental principles of international environmental law into a treaty dubbed the Global Pact for the Environment. In May 2019, the intergovernmental working group completed its mandate and adopted a set of recommendations that were formally endorsed by the United Nations General Assembly in August 2019. Contrarily to what the supporters of the Global Pact for the Environment project had hoped for, the working group only recommended the preparation of a “political declaration” without referring to the codification of the principles of international environmental law. This paper offers a critical commentary of the outcome of these negotiations. The analysis suggests that the decision to elaborate a Global Pact for the Environment would have entailed considerable risks for international environmental law and that if adopted, this instrument would not have necessarily helped to increase the problem-solving capacity of international environmental law. Based on the language used in the recommendation to prepare a “political declaration”, the paper also discusses some of the key elements that could shape and inform the upcoming negotiations of this declaration.
Highlights
International environmental law is composed of a myriad of multilateral agreements
Since 2018, these questions have been the subject of intense discussions between the members of the United Nations in a negotiation process that recently came to an end, but which spurred a reflection on a global scale on what needs to be done to increase the problem-solving capacity of international environmental law
Often—yet unofficially—called the negotiations on the Global Pact for the Environment project, these discussions took place within an ad hoc open-ended working group established in May 2018 by the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) resolution 72/277 [1]
Summary
International environmental law is composed of a myriad of multilateral agreements. As these agreements usually have a limited and sectoral scope, international environmental law has no overarching treaty that can be regarded as its cornerstone. The mandate of the open-ended working group established by the UNGA in May 2018 was not to negotiate a legally binding instrument, the adoption of resolution 72/277 represented a major diplomatic success for the proponents of the Global Pact for the Environment, and an important first milestone in their quest for a new treaty. The following paper offers a brief analysis of the outcome of the negotiations on the Global Pact for the Environment project It discusses the decision of the open-ended working group not to recommend a process toward a legally binding instrument and the steps toward a future “political declaration”.
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