Reuters | April 2, 2002
UNITED NATIONS - A new world environment organization and an international environmental court would help make sense of the more than 500 environmental agreements and agencies now operating around the globe, researchers said last week. Legal and environmental experts from the Tokyo-based U.N. University called on a U.N. development summit opening in Johannesburg in August to weigh creating a global body with powers over the environment similar to those of the World Trade Organization over international trade. Their report said environmental regulation has emerged in an ad hoc and somewhat chaotic fashion over the past 30 years due to "the essentially random emergence of environmental issues onto national and international political agendas." The soaring number of global environmental institutions argues strongly that the current system of international environmental governance is "too complicated (and) steadily getting worse," the experts said They acknowledged that giving teeth to a new global agency was one of the most controversial aspects of the debate as governments are reluctant to turn over their powers to an outside body that could rule against them. But "one of the core benefits to be offered by a judicial settlement system is that it could bring a much greater level of predictability to international environmental governance by ending serious violations of international environmental law regardless of the perpetrator," their report argued. In addition, problems like global warming and pollution simply transcend national interests, they said. Report contributors included Steve Charnovitz of the U.S. law firm Wilmer, Cutler & Pickering, Peter Haas of the University of Massachusetts, Sebastian Oberthur of Berlin-based Ecologic and Joost Pauwelyn of the World Trade Organization.
c Reuters News Service 2002Reuters:
