The Right And Significance Of Resources In International Environmental Law

With the exposure of the environmental and resource issues in recent years, the international community pays more attention to them, thus the International Environmental Law also gets enormous development. However, many questions still remain further discussion. The resources discussed in this article is limited to the natural resources and countries are taken as the subjects to carry on research since they are the major subject of current international activities and also the natural resources’subject of right in International Environmental Law.Taking the international legal documents as the main support, this article systemizes and studies the rights of natural resources in International Environmental Law and divides the carrier of rights, the natural resources, into two parts:the natural resources within the jurisdiction of countries and the natural resources outside the jurisdiction of countries, specifically mainly around the national natural resources’ permanent sovereignty and the common heritage of mankind. Then two basic concepts which are the natural resources and the rights of natural resources, are elaborated in detail since the following discussion is inclined to be derailed if not making clear the exact meaning of the basic concepts.It can be found by studying the legal document of the international environment and the basic concepts that no matter the national natural resources’permanent sovereignty or the natural resources and its right outside of the domain, they both remain several issues that need to be further discussed. For example, for the national natural resources’permanent sovereignty, the legal document of the international environment only generally illustrates them in principle and the scholastic studies all monotonously discuss the external sovereignty and internal management, while they just ignore an issue that the predominant requirement of the national natural resources’ sovereignty is national ownership and the uppermost proprietorship is the right to use. Citizens rather than the countries are served as a subject to use the natural resources, thus it cannot be called as national sovereignty as the users arc the citizens. In addition, the academic circles are different to the understanding of the concept "global commons", each sticking to his own opinion. "Global commons" includes political domain and environmental domain, and this article obviously discusses the environmental domain of "global concern". The controversy mainly lies in the relationship between it and other concepts, namely which is the scope of "global concern", which natural resources should be included, what is the features of this resources and what standard should be used to formulate the access threshold. Obviously the academic circle has insufficient discussion towards them. Moreover, though it has been explicitly stipulated that the moon and its resources are the common heritage of mankind in Agreement Governing the Activities of States on the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies, however, the author still doubts about the statement. And the reason is not only that the moon does not conform to the standard of the common heritage of mankind.Finally, this article explains the necessity and significance of the above discussion, mainly from the perspective of safeguarding our global environment and the common interests of mankind and maintaining the harmonies among the countries.