The revival of the “public trust” for natural resources management has been among the most successful innovations in US environmental law. The concept also spread to other common-law systems around the world; e.g., the Indian Supreme Court in 1996 declared the public trust doctrine “part of the law of the land.”

Yet, the legal concept of public trusteeship – even though allegedly derived from ancient Roman law – is virtually unknown and frequently misunderstood in modern European legal systems, with the possible exception of Swedish and Italian environmental law (where equivalent concepts exist under different names). To illustrate the point, when Woodrow Wilson’s famous phrase of the “sacred trust of civilization” was inserted in the League of Nations Covenant in 1919, and subsequently in the United Nations Charter in 1945, it was mistranslated in French as “mission sacrée” (thus changing the meaning of the legal metaphor from trusteeship to agency).

In recent years, however, the trusteeship concept has made its way into several international treaties and judicial decisions. This presentation will explore the question whether, and how, the concept may eventually find acceptance in global environmental law.

2) Results/Conclusions

Public international trusteeship (i.e., fiduciary accountability of states) can be established:

 – by specific dedication of a particular resource to be conserved for a beneficial purpose; e.g. by “listing” protected areas under the 1972 World Heritage Convention, through a process of formal nomination by the host state, and conditioned acceptance by a committee representing all member states; or

 – by generic designation of an entire category of trust resources to be so conserved in all member states; e.g., the plant varieties listed in Annex I of the 2001 International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.

Another option is consensual definition of a resource as a “common heritage” trust, on the basis of objective criteria; e.g., the deep seabed area delimited under the 1982 Law of the Sea Convention. There have been proposals to expand that concept to marine resources in the “exclusive economic zone”; or to all living ocean resources; or to the global commons in general. The underlying rationale may indeed be stated in terms of an intergenerational trust, as formulated by Karl Marx in 1865: “Even society as a whole, a nation, or all contemporary societies taken together, are not owners of the Earth. They are merely its occupants, its users; and as diligent guardians, must hand it down improved to subsequent generations.”