| Even though international cooperation traditionally is a concept encountered in public international law, it has an important role to play in the private satellite communications sector. Satellite communications being activities that intrinsically have a global outreach, mutatis mutandis they require legal rules that would not focus on purely regional or local interests. National and international space law have for the past decade encountered criticism with respect to obvious insufficiencies that in turn affected space activities. The first reaction of learned space lawyers was to call for some redrafting of international space law. A second thought about it had them take into account national legislation in this possible harmonization process, but in any case this was to primarily be of concern for States.;However, the new millennium has brought its share of intellectual renewal and in the field of space law it has been translated in the acknowledgement that the private sector would have an important role to play, on the international scene, for the improvement of space law. It is this new legal thinking that has been characterized as "international cooperation" as applied to the private sector, that is the subject of this study. Hence, what is looked at is the position of the satellite communications sector on the international scene and what expertise it has to share with public fora for the overall improvement of space law and space activities. |
