CCAMLR and the Environmental Protocol: Relationships and Interactions

Abstract

It is more than passing significance that this chapter addressing the role of the Convention on the Conservation of Antarctic Marine Living Resources¹ (CCAMLR) in the implementation of the 1991 Protocol on Environmental Protection to the Antarctic Treaty² (Protocol) has been placed here in Part IV rather than in Part II of this book. Despite its own path-breaking origins in the Antarctic Treaty System (ATS) in environmental protection, CCAMLR, together with the institutions established under it, has not been perceived generally by the members of the ATS as providing ‘institutional support for the implementation of the Protocol’. This is not to say that all elements of the ATS, or indeed even of CCAMLR, are in agreement that this is, or should be, the case. Since the initial negotiation and including the more latterly implementation of the Protocol, some contributors to CCAMLR processes have objected privately to the institutional compasttnentalisation of the ATS’s only formal inter-governmental organisation.

Article FootNote

¹ ILM, Vol. 19, 1980, pp. 837ff.

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² ILM, Vol. 30, 1991,pp. 1,461ff.

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³ UNIS, Vol. 402, pp. 71ff. On the Protocol as supplementing the Antarctic Treaty, see Art. 4(1) of the Protocol.