The Rio Declaration on Environment and Development: A Commentary by Jorge E. Viñuales

Author:Jorge E. Viñuales
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2015-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

While Principle 11 does neither enshrine a legal principle nor an important concept like other principles of the Rio Declaration, it nevertheless contains three normative statements of the kind that could be found in treaties. It is worth starting the analysis with an examination of the type of obligation expressed in the different components of Principle 11, without prejudice to the issue of its legal nature under formal sources of international law.20

With regard to the normative operator of the three sentences, it is immediately apparent that the first sentence contains an actual obligation (‘shall’), whereas the normative content of the second and third statements is less clear when only textual interpretation is used. However, contextual interpretation in light of other principles of the Rio Declaration arguably resolves the ambiguity, leaving trade impacts of environmental legislation to Principle 12, and showing the proper scope of Principle 11 to be the duty of states to adopt effective environmental legislation, which is a common but differentiated responsibility (‘CBDR’)21 due to the need for adaptation to the local environmental and developmental context. These two complementary CBDR-like dimensions of Principle 11 will be further specified in the following sections.

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