France Submits 'Global Pact For The Environment' - An Umbrella Treaty For The Environment

On June 24, 2017, Laurent Fabius, President of the French Constitutional Supreme Court and former President of the Paris Climate Change Conference (COP 21), launched the "Global Pact for the Environment" project during a conference at the Sorbonne University in Paris. Attendants included former UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, former Irish President Mary Robinson, former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo.

The project was initiated by lawmakers throughout the world and by the Environment Commission of the Club des Juristes, a French legal think tank. It was developed through a network of distinguished scholars, judges, and lawyers representing the diversity of legal traditions, and its goal is to reach an agreement on the core principles of environmental law to be included in a treaty serving as a reference for multilateral environmental agreements already in force.

The Global Pact project is extensively built on existing principles, many of them enshrined in the Stockholm Declaration of 1972 and the Rio Declaration of 1992. However, the binding force of these principles is still undetermined, and the Global Pact initiators believe that environmental law would benefit from having its core principles entrenched in a treaty, which would make them enforceable in national courts. The principles promoted by the current draft of the Global...