Völkerrechtlicher Naturschutz und nationales Naturschutzrecht

Most parts of international environmental law were created in the second half of the 20th century, when the harmful impacts of industrialisation affected neighbour states and international courts and tribunals had to resolve bilateral conflicts on transfrontier pollution. Due to the absence of applicable treaty law, this led to the establishment of important abstract rules. Most important amongst these is a principle established in the Trail Smelter dispute in 1941 according to which no state is entitled to use its territory in a way that would cause harm to another state's territory. Natural resources, on the other hand, were considered as subject to the states' sovereign right of exploitation pursuant to their own environmental policies. The earliest attempts of the international community to establish cooperative treaty law on nature protection focused on the protection and management of species with an economic value. Since 1972, treaties on nature protection have become substantial in number and fairly comprehensive in scope. The most important agreements include the 1972 World Heritage Convention, the 1971 Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of International Importance and the 1979 Bonn Convention on the Conservation of Migratory Species of Wild Animals. The 1973 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) takes a different approach in regulating trade rather than protecting endangered species in situ. All these agreements are supplemented by the quite over-ambitious 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity that seeks to address almost every aspect of the protection of biological diversity. Most of these treaties have been transformed both into European as well as into German law. The 1979 Bern Convention on the Conservation of European Wildlife and Natural Habitats, for instance, was a model for the European Habitats-Directive 92/43/ EEC which itself has been implemented both in the Federal Nature Conservation Act as well as in the 16 Nature Conservation Acts of the German states. Both the European Court of Justice as well as the German judiciary have frequently referred to international nature protection law as an interpretative guideline for legislation meant to implement international obligations. Such references were made to the 1979 Bern Convention in interpreting the Habitats-Directive 92/43/EEC and the Federal Nature Conservation Act, to CITES in interpreting the former German implementation act or even generally to 'international and regional conventions' protecting certain species in order to prove that they are being threatened. Self-executing environmental obligations, on the other hand, play only a fairly limited role in domestic litigation in the field of nature protection, although some decisions suggest that article 3(1) of the Ramsar Convention may be regarded as being self-executing. All in all, the influence of international nature protection law on the German legal order has been appreciable but restricted. Whilst permanent sovereignty over natural resources still remains one of the cornerstones of the international legal order, the impact of international environmental law will grow stronger as global cooperation intensifies.