ABSTRACT
Among the many international legal developments concerning environmental protection that have emerged in the years since the Earth Summit (United Nations Conference on the Environment and Development – UNCED) in 1992 (see Chapter 1, pp 68 et seq), the entry into force of the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea on 16 November 1994, is arguably the ‘main event’. Part XII of UNCLOS is set out at p 214. As Nanda has put it, ‘during the decade following the Stockholm Conference (on the Human Environment), the environmental provisions of the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) constituted the single most important step forward toward the progressive development of international environmental law’ ((1995A) 257).
