The Intersection of International Environmental Law and International Humanitarian Law at Sea

Abstract

The maritime domain, largely comprised of international ‘commons’ covering more than 70% of the Earth’s surface, presents some unique challenges in identifying, much less reconciling, applicable International Environmental Law (IEL) and International Humanitarian Law (IHL) principles. This article posits that the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea, particularly its prescriptive and enforcement jurisdictional apportionments to nations relating to the prevention and control of pollution, establishes the peacetime IEL normative framework at sea. After exploring this normative framework, this article furthers the symposium’s overall theme by examining the interplay between this IEL framework and the relatively sparse and sporadic IHL regime at sea. As will be seen, this interplay is largely a question of the extent to which, if at all, these jurisdictional apportionments survive during periods of armed conflict. As such, it aligns more closely with the ‘application process’ for impacting the regulation of armed conflict, in which IEL applies alongside IHL to activities related to armed conflict, than with the ‘interpretation process’, whereby IHL is interpreted in light of IEL.