Prior Informed Consent for Chemicals In International Trade: The 1998 Rotterdam Convention

• Author: Katharina Kummer
• Date: 01 November 1999
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9388.00216
• Published date: 01 November 1999

Volume 8 Issue 3 1999 Proir Informed Consent for Chemicals

Katharina Kummer

Introduction

The Convention on the Prior Informed Consent Pro-

cedure for Certain Hazardous Chemicals and Pesticides

in International Trade

1

(the Rotterdam Convention) is

one of the latest additions to the multitude of inter-

national environmental agreements adopted over the

last 30 years. Through this instrument, the management

of industrial chemicals and pesticides will, for the f‌irst

time, be subjected to formal legal regulation at the global

level. Although Agenda 21 devoted a chapter to chemi-

cals management, other issues, such as ozone depletion,

transboundary movement of hazardous wastes, biologi-

cal diversity, climate change and desertif‌ication, have

hitherto tended to dominate international attention.

However, despite the relatively recent emergence of for-

mal international chemicals management regulation, the

environmental dangers posed by chemicals have long

been recognized. The roots of the Rotterdam Convention

go back to the early 1980s, and the principle of prior

informed consent (PIC) upon which the Convention

rests, has been applied on a voluntary basis to inter-

national trade in hazardous chemicals for nearly 10

years. Over the past few years, the possibility of a frame-

work convention on chemicals, with various protocols

dealing with the management of different substances,

has been considered. Although such a framework con-

vention has not materialized due to the opposition of a

number of states, the conclusion of the Rotterdam Con-

vention and the inception of the International Negotiat-

ing Committee on a global convention on persistent

organic pollutants

2

may well herald the emergence of an

international chemicals management regime. In the

absence of a framework convention, each aspect of glo-

bal chemicals regulation will be subject to a separate

international legal instrument. The Rotterdam Conven-

Blackwell Publishers Ltd. 1999, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA.

323

tion, being the f‌irst, is likely to have a certain pilot func-

tion.

The objective of the Rotterdam Convention is to protect

human health and the environment, primarily in

developing countries and countries in transition to a

market economy, against the effects of unwanted import-

ation of hazardous chemical substances. For this pur-

pose, it establishes a procedure based on the PIC prin-

ciple, which enables Parties to take an informed decision

on the future import of certain industrial chemicals and

pesticides, listed in an annex to the Convention.

The PIC principle, which constitutes the cornerstone of

the Rotterdam Convention, has become a well-known

feature of international regulation of transboundary

transfers of hazardous substances. It was also intro-

duced into the Basel Convention on hazardous wastes,

adopted in 1989, and into the draft protocol on trans-

boundary transfer of genetically modif‌ied organisms

(GMOs) to the Biodiversity Convention, currently nego-

tiated under the auspices of UNEP, although it takes a

somewhat different form in those instruments.

The UNEP London Guidelines

on Chemicals and the FAO

Code of Conduct on

Pesticides

In the 1980s, the development of international rules for

the two categories of substances now addressed by the

Rotterdam Convention was under the responsibility of

two different UN organizations, both of which elaborated

guidelines to assist countries in dealing with the sub-

stances in question. The Food and Agriculture Organiza-