The 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment was a watershed moment for global efforts to protect the environment. One of its main achievements was to serve as the inspiration for the development of the UN Economic Commission for Europe’s (UNECE) Air Pollution Treaties, with the 1979 Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution seeing considerable success in Europe. The attempts to replicate these models elsewhere, especially in the global South, have been far less successful and provide valuable case studies on the limits of legal transplantation. In Southern Africa, a lack of state capacity and data collection has prevented substantial progress on a multilateral framework convention. Northeast Asia suffers from the opposite problem whereby a host of overlapping multilateral initiatives are stifling the development of a coherent framework. Finally, Southeast Asia, while possessing a binding multilateral convention has failed to reduce haze pollution either by use of soft or hard obligations. Ultimately, the importation of the model for the UNECE’s air pollution treaties must acknowledge regional contexts and, in some cases, include international assistance to developing states.

This edited volume explores the development of international environmental law from the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment to the 2022 UN International Meeting Stockholm+50. In this introduction, after brief presentations of the outcomes of the two UN events, we provide comparative snapshots of international environmental law as of 1972 and 2022. Thus, building on the different contributions to this volume, the legal development during these 50 years is displayed with respect to general legal principles and North-South dimensions as well as the different issue areas of human rights, participatory rights, and the rule of law; the law on waste, chemicals, consumption and production; the law on the atmosphere, watercourses and the sea; and the law on nature and biodiversity. Through these brief yet composite pictures of the state of international environmental law, we sketch out some of the most decisive developments in the intervening years. Lastly, we venture a look at current trends and their potential significance for the future development of international environmental law – towards Stockholm+100.

This chapter explores the progressive development of international biodiversity law, from the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment to 2022. It shows that some of the most forward-looking concepts enshrined in the 1972 Stockholm Declaration have guided the progressive development of international biodiversity law for 50 years, notably the need for cosmopolitan cooperation that takes into account distributive justice issues and human rights. Still, the sectoral and largely incremental approach of the Stockholm Declaration no longer fits in addressing the urgent triple planetary crises that we face. Rather, a transformative change is needed. International biodiversity law, in its interactions with human rights, can contribute to such a change, by focusing on environmental and social justice issues, by ensuring that solutions, including climate change response measures, have sustainable impacts at other scales and in other sectors, and by empowering those whose interests are not being met and represent transformative sustainability values.

This chapter explores the progress of international climate law since the 1972 Stockholm Conference. Climate change threatens the very kind of massive and irreversible harm to the environment that the conference sought to prevent. The chapter shows first that customary international law, while imposing harm prevention obligations on states, has not kept pace with the global, intertemporal, and developmental dimensions of climate change. The chapter then offers a brief account of the evolution of the global climate regime launched by the 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. As the discussion will illustrate, 30 years later, the regime continues to wrestle with the complexities of the climate challenge, including difficult burden-sharing questions and the fraught relations between North and South. The 2015 Paris Agreement, which introduced a new approach to international climate governance, is a response to these complexities

In September 2021, when the Bataclan trial in Paris began, the United States was commemorating the 20th anniversary of the September 11 attacks in New York. The proximity of these two dates invites us to reflect on the two different responses to terrorism on either side of the Atlantic. Both responses followed the most severe and unprecedented shock experienced by both societies since World War II and yet the responses are starkly different. By examining different themes, we can see how these two countries have mobilised their judicial systems and the extent of which that their trials were anchored in a geography, legal culture, and an audience.

The first part of the chapter examines these approaches and, more broadly, the historical role of such trials. In the second part, we reflect on the lessons that can be learnt from the French Experience for prosecution of mass crimes. Lastly, we conclude with reflections on the French experience of the war/law on terror.

Sustainable development is a key concept in international politics that in a remarkably short period of time has also become firmly established in international law. Various multilateral conferences have been instrumental in this process – most notably, the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment and the 1992 Rio Conference on Environment and Development. While the 1972 Stockholm Declaration did not yet employ the very term of sustainable development, the idea of balancing environmental conservation and human development served no doubt as a central theme at the conference and in its outcome documents. In 1987, the Brundtland Commission introduced sustainable development as the key concept for this balancing act into world politics. Subsequently, sustainable development became anchored in various sources of international law, particularly normative UN resolutions, treaties, and judicial decisions, even to such an extent that the contours of an overarching international sustainable development law can be identified. However, its cradle remains in Stockholm in 1972.

International law and policy addressing the management of chemicals and wastes have undergone enormous change between the Trail Smelter arbitration in 1941 and the 2022 decision of the UN Environment Assembly to negotiate a global treaty on plastics in line with a circular economy approach. The link between the two may not be immediately evident. This chapter attempts to shed light on it by reviewing and analysing the developments that took place in the intervening 81 years but, more specifically, between the historic Stockholm Conference in 1972 and the UN International Meeting Stockholm+50 in 2022. Following an overview of the relevant developments, it discusses the different ‘lenses’ through which chemicals and waste management have been viewed over the past five decades, which has influenced policy approaches. It concludes with an outlook towards the future, proposing ways of building a comprehensive international regime for the management of chemicals and wastes, still elusive in 2022.