Health, safety & environmental measures and international economic law.

摘要

Owing to scientific insights and greater awareness of the deteriorating environment, since the 1970s governments have adopted a range of health, safety and environmental (HSE) measures at the national and international levels. While their purposes vary, HSE measures generally seek: the protection of the population from HSE risks; the internalization by economic operators of their negative externalities; and the transformation of consumption and production patterns. As a result, environmental law has emerged in comparative and international law.;HSE measures enter a policy space already occupied by international economic law. Generally, economic law seeks to enable successful economic ventures and development by removing obstacles to trade and securing protection to foreign investment. To these ends, it deploys dispute settlement mechanisms which may attract conflicts relating to HSE measures, especially where the costs of compliance with these measures significantly affect foreign investors or countries other than those benefiting from increased HSE protection.;International tribunals established under the World Trade Organization (WTO) or international investment agreements (IIAs) have scrutinized HSE measures. Adjudicating claims involving HSE measures confronts the challenge of affirming economic law disciplines while avoiding interpretations and results that defeat the objectives of the international regimes underlying HSE measures.;Under the paradigm of sustainable development, which seeks to reconcile economic development and environmental protection by integrating environmental issues in the development planning and decision-making process, systemic integration techniques of treaty interpretation avail to facilitate normative dialogue between economic, environmental, and human rights law. This dialogue is critical to threading coherence, synergy and mutual supportiveness among these regimes, so that they do not frustrate each other's goals.;In this light, this dissertation explores the issues and tensions involved in the adjudication of HSE measures by dispute settlement mechanisms established in international economic law, with a view to finding ways of building mutually supportive trade, investment, environmental and human rights regimes.