Many multilateral environmental treaties have established committees that monitor compliance and/or facilitate implementation. These committees can be triggered in a number of ways, e.g., when a State party seizes the committee concerning another State party’s compliance or implementation. This type of trigger resembles the most traditional judicial proceedings, as it opposes two States, and has the potential to lead to decisions of non-compliance. It is perceived to be more confrontational than facilitative. State-to-State triggers therefore sit in between judicial and non-judicial procedures, and between facilitation on the one hand and enforcement on the other. State-to-State triggers have only been used a handful of times. This chapter explores why such triggers have been sparsely used. It first explains how State-to-State triggers were established and describes the instacnes in which they have been used. It then identifies and discusses two main challenges faced by State-to-State triggers: challenges related to the perception and behaviour of States vis-à-vis such triggers, and challenges related to institutional design and procedural mechanisms of State-to-State procedures.

The negative connotations of reciprocity and its link to conduct-based responses in a lawless context have led to a juxtaposition in legal doctrine of reciprocity with community interests, institutionalisation, and the existence of objective legality. This chapter provides an overview of existing approaches to the subject and introduces the argument of this book, that reciprocity in public international law is not antithetical to community interests and obligations, but that its importance is explained by a structural factor: the sovereign equality of states. This explains and predicts where reciprocity will be relevant, and where it will find its limits.

The international law of the sea is one of the most dynamic branches of international law. Issues in the law are diverse and the scope of those issues is ever-expanding. In this regard, what is of particular importance is to identify the direction of the future development of the law of the sea. Thus, this final chapter will consider the following issues: (1) the contemporary issues that arise under paradigms I and II, (2) three models for protecting community interests at sea, that is, the decentralised-relational model, the institutional-communitarian model, the judicial model, (3) a need for systemic outlook in the law of the sea, and (4) temporal elements in the future development of the international law of the sea.

The chapter addresses problems with the general rules of state responsibility from the perspective of functionality. The analysis follows the structure of the Articles on State Responsibility, which means that the critique is organized according to the elements of an international wrongful act, the content of responsibility, as well as its implementation. It is argued that the general rules of state responsibility struggle to respond to the heterogeneity of actors, subject-matters, and norms implicated in the governance of international affairs. It is further contended that state responsibility is marginalized in some situations; in situations of serious wrongs international criminal law has appeared as an alternative remedy, and significant harm is dealt with through rules on international liability. Thus, other forms and regimes of responsibility have appeared, making it necessary to understand responsibility in broader and more versatile terms than what is offered by the state responsibility doctrine.