Abstract

The aim of this study is to determine the appropriateness of adjudicative means of dispute settlement, in particular of international arbitration and the ICJ, to settle environmental disputes between sovereign States. The thesis put forth in this work is that international adjudicative means of settlement, which are by their nature bilateral and adversarial, might be beneficial in dealing with environmental disputes only in a rather limited number of circumstances. This limited capability is inherent both in the nature of environmental conflicts and in that of international adjudication. The premise upon which such thesis has been built is a pragmatic one. It assumes that when States resort to international adjudication to settle environmental disputes, they do not so much aim to get satisfaction on abstract points of law but rather seek to have the specific problems that precipitated the dispute resolved as a result, directly or indirectly, of the adjudicatory process

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