The Precautionary Principle: A European Perspective

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The Precautionary Principle: A European PerspectivePeter H. Sand aa Institute of International Law, University of MunichPublished online: 03 Jun 2010.

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Human and Ecological Risk Assessment: Vol. 6, No. 3, pp. 445-458 (2000)

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The Precautionary Principle: A European Perspective

Peter H. SandInstitute of International Law, University of Munich

ABSTRACT

The ‘precautionary principle’, as formulated in the 1992 Rio Declaration on Environ-ment and Development, calls for regulatory action in the face of serious environmentalrisks even in the absence of full scientific certainty. This paper traces negotiation of theprinciple at the Rio Conference, and its history in Europe from 1969 Swedish legislationto the latest directives of the European Union. As illustrated by recent court cases fromGermany and France, in particular (on nuclear power plants, electro-magnetic fields,and genetically modified organisms), judicial interpretation of the principle has tendedto be restrictive. Future law-making in this field is likely to focus on public access toenvironmental risk information, and on the development of new ‘right-to-know’ instru-ments such as mandatory product labelling and transnational pollutant release inven-tories, an area where Europe can still learn from North American experience.

Key Words: biosafety standards, environmental risk management, European Union,hormone-beef dispute, international environmental law, public accessto information.

The precautionary concept has been described as “the most important new policyapproach in international environmental cooperation” (Freestone, 1991, 36). Aftermaking its international debut in a number of ‘soft law’ statements in the 1980s –including the World Charter for Nature (UNGA, 1982), ministerial declarations atthe 1984 and 1987 North Sea Conferences, and in the Governing Council of theUnited Nations Environment Programme (UNEP, 1989) –, it has since found its wayinto at least fourteen ‘hard’ multilateral agreements (Cameron and Abouchar,1991; Nollkaemper, 1991; Hey, 1992; Scovazzi, 1992; Hohmann, 1994; Freestoneand Hey, 1995; Primosch, 1996; McIntyre and Mosedale, 1997; Martin-Bidou, 1999):

• the 1991 Bamako Convention on the Ban of Import into Africa and the Control ofTransboundary Movement and Management of Hazardous Wastes within Africa,article 4(3)(f);

Address: Elisabeth-Str. 38, D-80796 Munich, Germany, Phone (49-89) 180-645, Fax (49-89)123-3985, e-mail <[email protected]>

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• The 1992 UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, article 3(3);

• The 1992 Convention on Biological Diversity, preamble;

• The 1992 UN/ECE Convention on the Protection and Use of Transboundary Water-courses and International Lakes, article 2(5)(a), and its 1999 London Protocol onWater and Health, article 5(a);

• The 1992 Paris Convention for the Protection of the Marine Environment of the North-East Atlantic, article 2(2)(a);

• The 1992 Helsinki Convention for the Protection of the Baltic Sea Area, article 3(2);

• The 1994 Oslo Protocol (on sulphur emission reductions), the two 1998 Aarhus Protocols(on heavy metals, and on persistent organic pollutants), and the 1999 GothenburgProtocol (on acidification, eutrophication and ground-level ozone) to the 1979 UN/ECE Convention on Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution, preambles;

• The 1995 Agreement implementing the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of theSea, relating to Straddling Fish Stocks and Highly Migratory Fish Stocks, article 6(2);

• The 1996 Syracuse Protocol (to the 1976 Barcelona Convention) for the Protectionof the Mediterranean Sea against Pollution from Land-Based Sources, preamble; and

• the 1996 London Protocol to the 1972 Convention on the Prevention of MarinePollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter, article 1(3).

According to a landmark 1996 decision by the Indian Supreme Court, theprecautionary principle is already considered part of customary international law(Vellore case, 1996, confirmed in five subsequent judgments by the same court,Anderson, 1998). Yet invocation of the principle as a basis for global risk manage-ment remains controversial — sometimes explosively so: witness the collapse ofnegotiations for a biosafety protocol at the Cartagena meeting in February 1999,where disagreement on ‘precautionary’ draft provisions was a contributing factor(IISD, 1999, 3). Even after the compromise reached in Montreal on 29 January2000, the new protocol (<http:www.biodiv.org/biosafe/BIOSAFETY-PROTOCOL.htm>) leaves a wide deficit of interpretation.

The standard English translation as ‘precautionary principle’ is but an all tooimperfect approximation of the Vorsorge-Prinzip from which it was derived, since itfails to bring across some of the linguistic ‘hyperlinks’ associated with the originalGerman concept — such as Besorgnis (concern) and Sorgfalt (care, in the sense ofdiligence), let alone the mystical figure of Sorge (care, in the sense of worry) fromGoethe’s 1832 drama, Faust (Part II, Act V, Scene IV), recently rediscovered byAmerican environmental lawyers (Rich, 1994, 318; see Burdach, 1923). To avoidsome of the semantic confusion noted by critics (Gündling, 1990, 26; Bodansky,1991), let us take as a starting point the core definition as formulated in Principle

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15 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development (UNCED, 1992, 6; Mann,1992; Koh, 1994; Porras, 1994):

Where there are threats of serious or irreversible damage, lack of full scientificcertainty shall not be used as a reason for postponing cost-effective measures toprevent environmental degradation.

Save for the not-so-innocuous rider ‘cost-effective’ — which originated in article7 of the Second World Climate Conference (WMO, 1990; Kovar, 1993, 134), andwhich was slipped into the Rio text by the US delegation, over the objections of theEuropean Union and Japan,1 — that sentence in Principle 15 was a verbatim quotefrom the 1990 Bergen Declaration by 34 environment ministers from Europe andNorth America.2

Predictably, therefore, the principle was eyed with some suspicion by ThirdWorld countries (the so-called ‘Group of 77’), who always considered it a typical‘Northern’ demand and who swallowed it without enthusiasm at the time, and onlyin return for the acceptance of other ‘Southern’ points in the bargain.3 It is all themore ironic now, eight years after Rio, to see the United States and its ‘Miami group’in the biosafety negotiations opposing the precautionary principle — and the Groupof 77 (now called the ‘like-minded group’) defending it, with diplomatic supportfrom the European Union…

1 While the ‘cost-‘prefix had not been part of the original US draft proposal submitted toWorking Group III of the UNCED Preparatory Committee during its 4th session (A/CONF.151/PC/WG.III/L.21 of 4 March 1992, principle 6), it was added as an oral‘correction’ by the US delegate, State Department lawyer Jeffrey D. Kovar, on 12 March1992. Even though the delegates of Portugal (on behalf of the European Union) andof Japan on 24 March 1992 proposed to delete the rider, Working Group III retained it[within square brackets] in the Chairman’s draft of 31 March 1992 (A/CONF.151/PC/WG.III/L.33, principle 12) which served as the basis for the final text at Rio (A/CONF.151/PC/WG.III/L.33/Rev.1, principle 15).

2 Ministerial Declaration on Sustainable Development in the UN/ECE Region (Bergen/Norway, 16 May 1990), article 7, Yearbook of International Environmental Law 1 (1990), 431;also incorporated in article 3(3) of the 1992 UN Framework Convention on ClimateChange. Inclusion of that same sentence, with only minor variations, was formallyproposed in the pre-Rio negotiations by the USA (see note 1), by the European Union(A/CONF.151/PC/WG.III/L.25 of 6 March 1992, principle 6, revising an earlier pro-posal submitted at the 3rd PrepCom session, and replacing ‘should’ by ‘shall’), and by theScandinavian countries (A/CONF.151/PC/WG.III/L.27 of 9 March 1992, principle 11).

3 The original proposal submitted on 4 March 1992 by China and by Pakistan (on behalfof the Group of 77, A/CONF.151/PC/WG.III/L.20) made no reference to the precau-tionary principle, but eventually took it on board – albeit with a rider reserving thespecial socio-economic situation of developing countries, again drawn from the ministe-rial declaration of the Second World Climate Conference (WMO 1990) – in a revisedcompromise draft on 19 March 1992 (A/CONF.151/PC/WG.III/L.20/Rev.1, principle12). The United States reserved its position on some of the ‘Southern’ points (by wayof an ‘interpretative statement’ at the time of adoption of the Rio Declaration, A/CONF.151/26, vol.IV, paragraph 16), but did not object to Principle 15 (Kovar, 1994,122; Sand, 1999, 67).

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Not that Europeans have been all that unanimous about it all this time. In 1995,when the precautionary principle was for the first time invoked before the Interna-tional Court of Justice — in the Nuclear Tests case brought by New Zealand againstFrance —, the French Government responded that the legal status of the principlewas ‘uncertain’ (ICJ, 1995, p. 71; Bothe, 1996). And not so long ago, the UKGovernment had even less kind things to say about the principle when it was invokedby the European Commission as a reason for precautionary trade restrictions againstthe risk of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), popularly known as ‘mad cowdisease’ (Giddens, 1998, 29; Giddens, 1999, 9). Principles are principles — alas, theFrench bomb is the French bomb; and British beef is British beef.

From the point of view of comparative law, a country-by-country study commis-sioned by the German Federal Environmental Agency came to the conclusion thatthere are indeed two distinct camps in the modern industrialized world (Rehbinder,1991): ‘precaution countries’ (including Germany, the Netherlands, Sweden, andSwitzerland, along with the United States); and ‘protection countries’ (includingFrance and the UK, along with Japan). Historically, to be sure, the precautionaryapproach in Europe goes back much further than the often-quoted German parlia-mentary report on the environment (Umweltbericht, 1976; von Moltke, 1988; Boehmer-Christiansen, 1994; von Lersner, 1994) or the Swiss Federal Environmental Protec-tion Act (Umweltschutz-Gesetz, 1983, article 1/2; Koechlin, 1989). Sociologists havelong diagnosed a ‘crisis of the provident state’ as Europe had come to know it in the19th and early 20th century (Rosanvallon, 1981). François Ewald, at the Collège deFrance, notes a transformation from traditional social security to ‘insurance society’(Ewald, 1986) in the new welfare state which Anthony Giddens, at the LondonSchool of Economics, now sees as ‘a form of collective risk management’ (Giddens,1999). Ulrich Beck, at the University of Munich, comes to the opposite conclusion:What he calls ‘risk society’ or ‘world risk society’, in the wake of globalization (Beck,1986, 1992, 1995, 1996, 1998; Lagadec, 1981), is actually un-insured (versicherungslos),he says; for paradoxically, post-modern society’s insurance coverage seems to de-crease as the risks increase (Beck, 1991a, 122).

Be that as it may — it was in Scandinavia, at the peak of that region’s ownexperiment with the welfare state, where the precautionary principle was firsttranslated into a general legal rule: The Swedish Environment Protection Act(Miljöskydds-Lag, 1969; Sand 1972, 6; Westerlund, 1981) — enacted half a yearbefore the US National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA, 1970) — introduced theconcept of ‘environmentally hazardous activities’ (miljöfarlig verksamheter; Westerlund,1975, 1977), for which the burden of proof is flatly reversed i.e., the regulatoryauthorities “do not have to demonstrate that a certain impact will occur; instead, themere risk (if not remote) is to be deemed enough to warrant protective measuresor a ban on the activity” (Westerlund, 1981, 231). That, of course, is nothing lessthan what international legal experts today define as the most radical variant of theprecautionary principle (CSD 1996, 18). It has been the law in Sweden for the pastthirty years, and is also reflected in the legislation of other Nordic countries,including Denmark’s 1973 Environment Protection Act, Norway’s 1981 PollutionControl Act and Finland’s 1992 Environmental Permits Act (Lindgard, 1998). (Theidea of subjecting hazardous industries to precautionary permit conditions can, ofcourse, be traced much further back in European environmental law, including the

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1906 Alkali and Other Works Regulation Act in Great Britain, 19th century Frenchlegislation on installations classées, and Prussia’s Gewerbe-Ordnung of 1845).

In less radical garb, precautionary policies also made their appearance in theemerging quasi-federal law of the European Union, starting with some early envi-ronmental ‘directives’ adopted in the wake of the 1976 accident in Seveso/Italy(‘Seveso Directive’, 1982; Hancher, 1995), and culminating in more recent enact-ments such as the 1990 GMO Directive, the 1997 ‘Novel Foods Regulation’ and the1998 Biotechnology Directive (Rehbinder, 1999), where EU law-making — becauseof trade prerogatives in the intra-European common market — has to a large extentsuperseded national regulatory powers. The 1992 Maastricht treaty amendment,which may be said to have elevated the precautionary principle to the rank ofEuropean constitutional goal,4 was merely a logical consequence and formal recog-nition of that trend. There is no doubt that its impact will be felt well beyond thegeographical scope of the EU, as the latest row over ‘hormone-beef’ imports fromthe United States illustrates.5 Indeed, the precautionary principle “seems to loom asa major new controversial issue on the trade and environment horizon” in negotia-tions in the World Trade Organization (ICTSD, 1999, 8; von Moltke, 1999), with theEuropean Union pleading for clarification and expansion of the principle, and theUS calling for sanitary and phytosanitary measures to be based on ‘sound science’.

Still, European political and even legislative pronouncements of the precaution-ary principle are one thing, application by courts and administrative authorities isquite another. So far, the European Court of Justice has sanctioned the principleonly implicitly, when confirming the validity of EU Council Regulation 345/92 onDriftnet Fishing, which had been challenged in a French court (Mondiet case, 1993;Hey, 1998, 6). In Sweden, “even if the principle is well and explicitly founded in law,the authorities are often reluctant to make use of it — even though in theory theyare obliged to do so” (Westerlund 1981, 231). In the United Kingdom, where theprinciple was formally endorsed by a Government White Paper (Department of theEnvironment 1990, 7; Haigh, 1994), attempts at establishing it in the courts havebeen notoriously unsuccessful in at least two instances (Duddridge case, 1994;Gateshead case, 1996), and inconclusive in others (McAlpine Homes case, 1994;Bodansky and Brunnée, 1998, 16). In the Netherlands, two judgments involvingwastewater discharges and offshore drilling permits, respectively, did invoke theprecautionary principle but may also be founded on other existing rules of Dutchenvironmental legislation and administrative due process (Wadden Sea cases, 1996-97; Nollkaemper, 1998; Backes and Verschuuren, 1998). The French Council of

4 Article 130(r )(2) stipulates that EU environmental policy “shall be based on the precau-tionary principle”; International Legal Materials 31 (1992), 247 (Epiney, 1997, 98; Doyleand Carney, 1999). EU guidelines on implementation of the principle are in prepara-tion. Pursuant to the 1997 Amsterdam consolidation of the Treaty (effective 1 May1999), article 130(r) has now been renumbered article 174; Official Journal of the EuropeanCommunities (1997) C 340/145.

5 After the Appellate Body of the World Trade Organization (WTO) on 13 February 1998found the EU ban on US ‘hormone beef’ imports contrary to the WTO Agreement onSanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (SPS, in force since 1995; Walker, 1998), the EUsubmitted new scientific evidence in May 1999 to maintain the ban, which now facescountervailing trade measures by the United States.

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State, in an action for closure of a nuclear power plant on the Swiss border nearGeneva, initially refused to consider the precautionary principle formulated in theMaastricht amendment (see note 4 above) as self-executing in the member states ofthe European Union (Superphénix case, 1997, 229; Colson, 1998), but has sinceaccepted it as “serious ground” to justify suspension of a ministerial permit for thecultivation and marketing in France of bio-engineered corn (by a Swiss corporation,tit for tat: Transgenic Maize case, 1998).6 However, what remains of the principleafter it was transformed into French national law reads rather different from theoriginal Rio text:

Lack of certainty, taking into account scientific and technical knowledge at thetime, shall not delay effective and commensurate measures, at economicallyacceptable cost, to prevent the threat of serious and irreversible damage to theenvironment (Loi Barnier, 1995).7

The focus of the precaution debate in France (Godard, 1997) has thus shifted tolegal definitions of ‘irreversibility’, as a criterion for distinguishing tolerable fromintolerable risks — so far with less than conclusive results (Fritz-Legendre, 1998;Prieur,1998).

Germany has had the largest share of court cases involving the precautionaryapproach, in response to the plethora of federal environmental legislation enactedsince the 1970s, much of it sector-specific and anything but uniform or consistent.Among the most heavily litigated precautionary laws were the Federal Act forProtection against Pollution (BImSchG, 1974, article 5/1/2), and the BiotechnologyAct (GenTG, 1990, article 6/2). The overriding tendency of the courts has been tolimit the margin of administrative discretion which the precautionary principleinevitably confers and which critics see as potentially ‘boundless’ (uferlos: Rehbinder,1991, 11). For example, as regards operating permits for nuclear reactors, the twoleading judgments by the Federal Constitutional Court (Kalkar case, 1978) and theFederal Administrative Court (Wyhl case, 1985) ostensibly confirm the executive’spower to take precautionary measures against identified ‘dangers’ as well as againstas yet unidentified ‘risks’, but then go on to define a lower-level ‘residual risk’ (Rest-Risiko) which the public (and the plaintiffs adjoining the power plant) will have totolerate; and in a more recent decision, the Federal Administrative Court consid-ered leucemia risks in a power plant’s neighborhood too remote to warrant revoca-tion of a lower court’s permit approval (Krümmel case, 1998). Similarly, in severalappellate judgments concerning electro-magnetic fields of mobile phone networks,actionable health risks were distinguished from mere ‘concerns’ (Besorgnis) deemed

6 Final judgment on the merits has been postponed, pending a request to the EuropeanCourt of Justice for determination of compatibility with applicable EU law, in light ofearlier decisions (97/98 and 98/294) by the EU Commission to legalize geneticallymodified corn, Official Journal of the European Communities (1997) L 31/69 and (1998) L131/33. See case No. 6/99, Official Journal of the European Communities (1999) C 71/17(Bojic Bultrini, 1998, 484; Douma and Matthee, 1999, 157).

7 Article 1(1)(3) [my translation and emphasis]. Curiously, the authentic French text ofPrinciple 15 of the 1992 Rio Declaration did not contain the ‘cost-effective’ US rider (seenote 1 above), an omission for which the 1995 French statute more than compensates.

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insufficient to invalidate operating permits.8 In a case involving production oferythropoietin (EPO hormone) from bio-engineered mouse cells, the Administra-tive District Court of Giessen held that precautionary measures with regard togenetically modified organisms were warranted only “up to a degree which in lightof risk assessment on the basis of the best available scientific and technologicalinformation is sufficient to ensure control of the risk” (EPO-Mouse case, 1992;Appel, 1996; Jörgensen and Winter, 1996). And in a landmark case concerningforest damage attributed to acid rain, the Federal Supreme Court had in 1987already dismissed attempts at invoking the precautionary principle as a basis forholding the federal government liable for ‘legislative inaction’ (Waldsterben case,1987; Rest,1997, 414). There is indeed a wide range of legal and proceduralconstraints on precautionary action — including the Administration’s duty to makefull use of all available information; the duty to undertake benefit-risk assessments;the duty to motivate and disclose assessments; and general due process rules suchas the requirement that precautionary measures be commensurate with the risk, andnot excessive (Von Moltke, 1988, 68; Rehbinder, 1991, 253; Ladeur, 1995, 99; DiFabio, 1996, 572).

That being said, the precautionary principle is alive and well in Germany. It isperhaps worth recalling that the principle was introduced by a Social-DemocratGovernment in the 1970s, and the Social-Democrats are now back in power incoalition with the Greens. One of their first long-term policy decisions — to phaseout nuclear power production — was crucially dependent on the Vorsorge-Prinzip asa legal basis to terminate existing operating permits. The German Nuclear EnergyAct (Atom-Gesetz 1976, article 7/2/3) provides for ‘conditionally suspended injunc-tions’ (Verbot mit Erlaubnis-Vorbehalt) rather than conditional permits, thereby shift-ing the burden of proof to the operator. Whether the precautionary principle willalso serve to terminate Germany’s existing long-term contracts for nuclear waste re-processing in France and Britain remains to be seen. The bilateral agreementsconcluded in 1990 between the German Nuclear Fuel Re-Processing Corporation(DWK) and its French and British counterparts (Compagnie Générale des MatièresNucléaires and British Nuclear Fuels plc), though backstopped by joint governmentaldeclarations, contain saving clauses in the event of ‘act or restraint of government’(‘Gesetze oder einschränkende Massnahmen der Regierung’ in the German text; Wahl andHermes, 1995, 34). Significantly, the need to preserve sufficient flexibility forexecutive action in transnational nuclear relations is considered part of the ratio-nale for the precautionary principle as interpreted by the Federal ConstitutionalCourt (Kalkar case, 1978, 147).

The legal ramifications of the precautionary principle are probably most signifi-cant when it comes to information access. It was Peter Bernstein, in his fascinatingbook Against the Gods, who said that “risk is not fate, it is choice” (Bernstein, 1996,8); and his point seems to be borne out by anthropologists contending that “wechoose the risks in the same package as we choose our social institutions” (Douglas

8 Decision of 18 May 1993 by the Munster OVG (Administrative Court of Appeal), NeueZeitschrift für Verwaltungsrecht [New Administrative Law Review] 12 (1993), 1115; twofurther judgments reported ibid., 1116-1119 (Di Fabio, 1995); and recent cases followingthe 1996 German federal regulations on electro-magnetic fields (Kirchberg, 1998).

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and Wildawsky, 1982). It follows that those who take the risk (and who will poten-tially suffer the consequences) should be given equal access to all informationenabling them to know what their choices are. Hence, information about risk ofharm should never be monopolized, whether by public or private knowledge-holders, and should by definition be common property.

A number of mechanisms are becoming available for this purpose — fromprecautionary labelling and life-cycle product information, to new methods ofpublic and private risk disclosure. In this regard, most parts of the world still havea lot to learn from the American experience. Munich sociologist Ulrich Beckactually considers civil society ‘disenfranchised in risk matters’ (Beck, 1991b, 68).Except for Scandinavia, European legal systems have no equivalent to what has beenextolled as “the new Magna Charta of ecological democracy” (Fischer, 1989, 152):the US Freedom of Information Act (FOIA, 1966) and its Canadian counterpart, theAccess to Information Act (AIA, 1983), which together with parallel state/provinciallegislation such as the Ohio Public Records Act and the British Columbia Freedom ofInformation and Protection of Privacy Act make government-held knowledge generallyaccessible to concerned citizens (CEC, 1999). The European Union’s timid Direc-tive on Freedom of Access to Information on the Environment (EC Directive 90/313, 1990)has yet to be transformed into actual administrative practice in most member states(Hallo, 1996; Kimber and Eckardt, 1999); and the more progressive Aarhus Conven-tion on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justicein Environmental Matters (UN/ECE, 1998; Prieur, 1999) has yet to enter into force.

There is even less international experience with rules on access to privately-heldrisk information, by way of ‘right-to-know’ and ‘duty-to-warn’ statutes. Communitiesoutside North America can only dream of the kind of geographically specific anduser-friendly data now available from the US Toxics Release Inventory (TRI, 1998; Bassand MacLean, 1993; EDF, 1998) and Canada’s National Pollutant Release Inventory(NPRI, 1997; UNEP, 1999, 309), which anybody can download from the Internet.Systematic extension of this type of risk communication across political boundaries— e.g., through voluntary commitments or ‘codes of conduct’ by responsiblemultinational corporations — could go a long way toward making the precautionaryprinciple work transnationally (OECD, 1998). Rather than the ‘provident state’, itis the provident citizen and the provident consumer who must be empowered totake informed precautionary action — so as to exercise the choice of risks which weare told we have.

REFERENCESAIA (Access to Information Act). 1983. Revised Statutes of Canada (1985), chapter A-1.Anderson, M. R. 1998. International environmental law in Indian courts. Review of European

Community and International Environmental Law 7,1, 21–30.Appel, I. 1996. Stufen der Risiko-Abwehr [stages of guard against risk]. Natur und Recht

[Nature and Law] 18:5, 227-235.Atom-Gesetz. 1976. German Nuclear Energy Act of 23 December 1959, as revised in 1976.

Bundesgesetzblatt [Federal Legislation Gazette] (1976) 1, 3053.Backes, C. W., and Verschuuren, J. M. 1998. The Precautionary Principle in International,

European, and Dutch Wildlife Law. Colorado J. Int. Environ. Law Policy 9:1, 43–70.

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Documents

The Precautionary Principle: A European Perspective