Unit 11, Lesson 2, Exercise C 2.9
Part 2 Let’s look first at what is generally known as public international law. Public international law concerns the relationship between sovereign nations. It has developed mainly through international conventions, though custom can play an important role. Its modern development began in the middle of the 19th century. The two world wars, the League of Nations and other international organizations such as the International Labour Organization or ILO helped to establish many of the foundations of modern public international law. After the Second World War, the League of Nations was replaced by the United Nations, founded under the UN Charter. One of the principal pillars of this is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Other international norms and laws have been established through international agreements such as the Geneva Conventions on the conduct of armed conflicts. All these have had both a direct and indirect influence on a country’s sovereignty. However, recent international conflicts provide a good example of how individual countries interpret the role of the UN and the ways in which the Geneva Conventions should operate.
Increasingly, in the modern world, public international law, as reflected in international conventions and agreements, is influenced, directly or indirectly, by pressure groups. There is Greenpeace, for instance, who campaign on environmental issues. Their work to save whales has certainly influenced countries in their attitude to the worldwide ban on whaling. Another environmental organization is Friends of the Earth, which, as well as campaigning for the environment, also tries to control the immense power of big businesses, such as Tesco, the largest UK supermarket chain. Their work has led to changes in food laws in some countries.
An important aspect of the international law landscape is, of course, the regional trade organizations – such as the EU or Mercosur, or ASEAN – which governments may elect to belong to. These groups provide a highly advantageous internal market and often protect their members from competition from businesses from outside the group. But these trade organizations then determine, to a large extent, who a particular country is allowed to trade with. There are quotas for goods from countries outside the trading group, for example, which members of the group must stick to. A good example of this is the
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situation in 2005 involving the flood of Chinese textile imports into the EU. Too many Chinese clothing products came into Europe, breaching the quota limits allowed. European manufacturers were afraid that European jobs would suffer and the clothes were kept locked in warehouses until an agreement was reached. This may seem like a matter of economics, not law, but of course the quota system and the action taken when quotas are exceeded come from the international trade agreement in the first place.
There are also other organizations, such as the
World Bank or the World Trade Organization, which can have a strong influence on how countries run their economies. The World Bank will often tell a country exactly how to behave economically if it wants to borrow money from the organization. The WTO deals with the rules of trade between nations. The main structure of the WTO is a set of trading agreements, which are negotiated and then signed up to by the governments of the world’s trading nations. Again, is this about economics or law? It’s about both. To the extent that disputes between states fall outside a unified legal framework, this raises issues of the enforceability of standard practices.
Of course, the burning issue of the moment is climate change. To what extent can public international law have a major influence in this area? Some people say that international agreements have done nothing to change the actual behaviour of some nation states. The evidence shows that this is especially true with respect to the United States. In my view, the refusal of the US to sign up to the Kyoto Protocol is a case in point. This failure set a very bad role model. A very good article by Jana von Stein called The International Law and Politics of Climate Change has some interesting ideas on how the creators of international environment agreements can design mechanisms that deter defection without deterring participation. In other words, how the lawmakers can create international agreements which people actually sign up to, rather than run away from because their conditions are too harsh. Briefly, in her paper, von Stein argues that the harder a treaty is, the more ‘selective’ states are about ratification. She has no doubt that harder treaties may actually deter states from joining, and I quote: ‘these institutional features may deter from joining the very states whose environmental practices are least consistent with the treaty’s requirements.’
So, as we can see, the effect of public international law on domestic law is very
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