ABSTRACT
Legal and institutional issues concern the ‘machinery’ of a treaty that ensures its proper functioning. They are an essential subject of any negotiation process, but owing to their technical nature they are not usually among the prominent topics in environmental negotiations. As befits a support mechanism, elaboration of the legal and institutional part of the protocol started only after discussions on the substantive content of the protocol had entered the negotiation phase. Contact Group 2, mandated to deal with legal and institutional issues, was set up at the third meeting of the Open-ended Ad Hoc Biosafety Working Group, in October 1997. Many developing countries, under the leadership of the African group, considered it an essential element of the protocol and strongly favoured a full liability regime, to be elaborated as a part of the protocol.
