The Enlightenment And Promotion To The Law Of The Sea From The Notion Of Sustainable Development

The limitation in traditional viewpoints of value has lead to environmental crises throughout the world. Facing the grim reality, human beings have to reexamine their own economic behaviors and profoundly introspect their traditional viewpoints in development, environment and resource. The revolution in the viewpoint of values leads man to a more civilized era --- Environmental Era.In the process of legal innovations in the Environmental Era, the interests of human beings should be seen as an ultimate measurement of value in dealing with external relations between man and ecological environments. Under the direction of the notion of sustainable development, current legislative guidelines, principles as well as purposes ought to be updated in time, and adjustments, improvements and innovations should be given to regulations. The ideology of ecologicalization of law based on the notion of sustainable development constitutes the ideal goal pattern of the legislative development in the Environmental Era. It should be consistent with the notion in basic goal value and lead to the further development of the viewpoint of legal value."The Law of the Sea" is a general definition covering all the legal rules that regulate people's activities in the sea area and the social relations arising from these activities. Although the concept of "The Law of the Sea" has not been accepted prevalently by the Chinese scholars, concepts like integrating and systematizing the laws and regulations concerning the sea and maritime affairs, timely updating legislative guidelines, setting all-around legislative purposes as well as providing legislative guarantee for the sustainable development of oceanic resources have been widely recognized. This paper further proposes that, in order to ameliorate the current situation under which laws related to ocean appear to be incomplete, and regulative measures tend to be simplex, intersected, disordered and paradoxical, an adjustment mechanism should be constructed to comprehensively govern the relationship between human beings and the ocean by taking the ecologicalization methods and mechanisms of "Environment Resources Law of Ocean" as a principal part, and the adjustments to the social relationship from other departments under "the Law of the Sea" in terms of developing oceanic resources, as necessary supplements."The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea", the most comprehensive and the most extensive international convention of marine management so far, has already taken the lead in implying the notion of sustainable development. It has also exerted a profound influence on the revision of "The Law of Ocean Environment Protection of China" in 1999. After summarization of " promotions, accelerated by the viewpoint of sustainable development, to laws concerning oceanic environments and resources", the paper puts forward some concrete proposals on several aspects, such as completing of our legal responsibility system on compensation for polluting oceanic environments, innovating the property right system of oceanic resources, establishing and consummating supervising system of oceanic resource. Guided by the notion of sustainable development, innovating maritime law system in the Environmental era has been a trend in international maritime legislation. In China, this trend will lead to some update notions in, and some amendment to, maritime law, and a new chapter on "compensation of ship's pollution".