The Reconciliatory Approach: How Multilateral Environmental Agreements Can Harmonize International Legal Obligations

Transboundary environmental problems pose a specific challenge to the international legal system, as they often demand instruments providing for collective and far-reaching measures on a global scale. Such measures may interfere with other areas of international law, including trade law, human rights law and international humanitarian law (IHL), which may permit conflicting behaviour. The interference creates tensions between contradictory international legal obligations. Traditional legal tools have proven unable to respond satisfactorily to solve the tensions because they need a political solution going beyond law in many cases. In this chapter, I argue that the particular structure of environmental treaties, also referred to as multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs), allows their treaty institutions to adopt a ‘reconciliatory approach’. The approach describes how normative and institutional interactions take place under MEAs for the purpose of avoiding conflicts and tensions with other international legal obligations but at the same time furthers the common concern to mitigate global environmental problems. Such an approach contributes to overcome fragmentation of international law. This is possible because of the MEAs’ capability to go beyond treaty interpretations and adopt more practical and political oriented strategies to further their objectives. In the application of the World Heritage Convention (WHC), activities interfering and reconciling with obligations in IHL and the UN Charter have been noted to protect natural world heritage sites in the war-torn Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC).