ILC Draft on the Protection of the Environment in Relation to Armed Conflicts: An Instrument for Enhanced Protection?

Efforts to provide an international legal framework for the environment have been essentially circumscribed to the international peace law so far, with the consequence that environmental protection during wartime has been left on a ground of legal uncertainty. Thus in 2009, in the wake of an extensive and long-standing international debate, the United Nations Environment Assembly and the Environmental Law Institute asked for an intervention by the International Law Commission. In particular, the latter was requested to examine the effectiveness of existing international law for protecting the environment during armed conflict in order to understand how it can be clarified, codified and expanded. In 2015, the Commission released a first document in which it set out the structure of what would become, in 2019, the Draft Principles on Protection of the Environment in Relation to Armed Conflicts, revised in 2022. This paper will focus on the Draft content in the light of the challenging requests made by the United Nations Environment Assembly, but not before briefly overviewing those -perhaps few- rules of the international law of armed conflicts designed to ensure, at least in abstracto, the protection of the environment in wartime.