The protection of the environment

The birth of modern international environmental law (IEL) can be traced back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries,¹ with the adoption of the first public health measures and industrialisation.² Timid efforts were also undertaken to limit the negative effects of warfare on the environment, with the adoption of ‘anthropocentric’³ treaties like the 1925 Geneva Gas Protocol.⁴ Recognition that the environment itself requires protection from the effects of armed conflicts, however, coincides with the Vietnam War (1955–1970),⁵ during which new techniques and methods of warfare were employed – such as the use of ‘cloud-seeding’, napalm and chemical defoliants – which have resulted in long-term contamination and significant destruction of forests and wildlife.⁶ On 16 December 1969, the UN General 385Assembly endeavoured to extend the scope of the 1925 Geneva Gas Protocol to chemical or biological agents intended to cause disease in or have direct toxic effects on ‘man, animals or plants’.⁷ The Stockholm Principles, a soft law instrument adopted in 1972, called upon states to cooperate to develop further international law regarding liability for environmental damage and to ‘strive to reach prompt agreement, in the relevant international organs, on the elimination and complete destruction of [nuclear] weapons’.⁸ To provide more ‘teeth’, in 1976 states adopted the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques (ENMOD Convention)⁹ and in 1977 Additional Protocols I and II to the Geneva Conventions of 1949. Further endeavours led to the adoption of soft-law tools like the 1982 World Charter for Nature¹⁰ and the 1992 Rio Declaration.¹¹ In 1992, the UN General Assembly urged member states to take all measures to ensure compliance with existing international law on the protection of the environment during armed conflict and recommended implementation into military manuals and dissemination.¹² In 1994, following the second Gulf War, when extensive pollution was caused by the intentional destruction of over 600 oil wells in Kuwait by the retreating Iraqi army,¹³ the ICRC launched its Guidelines on environmental protection during armed conflict.¹⁴ Although the General Assembly did not formally approve them, at its forty-ninth session it invited all states to disseminate and incorporate them into military manuals.¹⁵ A further legal development has been the entry into force of the Rome Statute of the ICC in 2002, codifying certain war crimes against the environment.¹⁶