ABSTRACT
The sovereignty and equality of states constitute the basic constitutional doctrine of public international law. This chapter aims to provide a theory of sovereignty, which is suitable for the challenges presented by a global world. Custodial sovereignty accordingly implies that a state is the custodian of its global environmental resources and that other states have an expectation that the relevant state will protect these resources for the whole of mankind. On a material level, the systems of economic and political inequality created by colonialism under the auspices of nineteenth-century international law continue to operate despite the ostensible change of legal regime. Permanent sovereignty is viewed as a component of state sovereignty, which is the legal expression of the economic side of political sovereignty and as such refers to economic sovereignty. The reconciliation of sovereignty and the global cooperative approach to environmental problems is, for instance, resembled in the Convention on Biological Diversity of 1992.
