ABSTRACT
Protection of the marine environment had not been given much attention at the Geneva Conference on the Law of the Sea in 1958 and the Geneva Conventions had little to say on the subject. This chapter examines three elements of this new legal regime: the distribution, content and control of prescriptive jurisdiction; the attribution of competence to enforce applicable standards; and the allocation of risk through principles of state responsibility and related concepts of liability, notification and intervention. Historically, enforcement has always been the weakest part of international efforts to regulate marine pollution. The Convention is notable for imposing on states a duty to enforce regulations on all sources of pollution, but the provisions on vessel pollution are again the most interesting. In traditional customary international law, responsibility for loss or damage represented the only significant general principle mitigating the freedom to pollute the seas.
