Towards sustainability: the basis in international law

Abstract

Having considered the theoretical and legislative pros and cons of customary law, we change direction toward sustainability as principle developed under international law. We are interested in both how sustainability develops as principle at the international level (see Sections 9.1 to 9.5) and how this top-down pressure may involve domestic local or native customs (see Sections 9.6 and 9.7). This chapter describes the connection between international law and domestic customs in a world of expanding universality, and explores the position of general principles of sustainability and precaution as instruments of law and legal sources. The first issue is whether international law – by its building of legal principles like sustainability and precaution, opens up for wide range recognition of local customs proven valid to viable resources management. Secondly, our task is to investigate whether the arena of international law is unshackling indigenous customary law from its national state constraints. We believe that the “ultimate test of a concept intended to have legal force and profound social and economic consequences is whether it changes behavior at both the individual and institutional levels.” This chapter reveals that the general principles of law and international custom as important sources of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), evolve legal principles of precaution and thus also sustainability out of purely political ideas. Members of the international society of states have mostly embraced these principles, and international courts, in cases they have adjudicated, solve legal disputes based on the precautionary principle.