Study On State Responsibility For Transboundary Environmental Damage

With the development of the science and technology, the human activity has extended to the field of chemical production, maritime resource exploitation, even to the nuclear and the outer spaceexploitation. All of these abovementioned activities help to promote the economic development of a country.However at the same time, increasing cases of transboundary environmental damage frequently happenall around the world, often with catastrophic consequences, effecting more than one countriy. In order to reduce the occurrence of such cross-border environmental pollution, the international community has tried to solve this problem by setting a system regulating the international responsibility for acts not prohibited by international law. This thesis is devoted to an analysis of international responsibility system used to settle environmental damage with the aim of avoiding environmental damages the protecting the world in a more effective way. However, due to some defects of this system, state responsibility only is not that practical in solving environmental disputes and it is in need to bring civil liability into this field.The thesis consists of five chapters. The introduction part describes the background of this study and the approach of analysis it takes. Chapter one briefly introduces the general issues relating to the transboundary environmental damage, such as the terms, concepts, features and so on. The whole study will be conducted under this framework. Chapter two mainly is devoted to the state responsibility for transboundary environmental damage from the perspective of international law. The introduction of the state responsibility into the compensation mechanism for transboundary environmental damage, through the practice of the states and the efforts of UN International Law Commission (ILC), is a breakthrough of the traditional state liability. After the analysis of the state responsibility, combined with some classic cases and famous treaties and conventions, we can concluded that the state responsibility system only is not perfect, far from enough to offer in-time and sufficient compensation to the victims. Chapter three emphasizes on the operation of the mechanism of civil liability for transboundary damage in both legislation and practice. From the view of legislation, civil liability is widely adopted in both the national legal system and in many international conventions as well. In the meanwhile, it should also be noted that the mechanism of civil liability is not powerful enough to solve all the problems arising from the transboundary environmental damage by itself, it can act a gap filler to the state liability and as an assistance to the state responsibility system. Conclusion is drawn in the last chapter. The author figures out in the first part that both liabilities shall be underlined to solve the issues of "timely and adequate compensation" in transboundary environmental damages and achieve the ultimate aim of environment protection in the most effective way. In the second part, recommendations are put forward for China in its future response to the issues of transboundary environmental damage based on Chinese current circumstance by taking the international background into consideration.