Radioactive Waste Disposal at Sea: Public Ideas ... - IMO

Interest-Based Regime Analysis 93
candidate for global agreement in Stockholm and advocated agreement in
this area at meetings with the Preparatory Committee. 12 The secretariat was
searching for problems which governments collectively could start addressing
by establishing a global regime. Although land-based sources of marine
pollution (rivers, pipelines, outfalls, and runoff) supposedly accounted for
as much as 90 percent of marine pollution, insufficient knowledge about
these sources and much higher economic costs associated with their control
made land-based marine pollution a very unlikely candidate for international
regulation. Scientific evidence of pollution from ocean dumping
also made this issue easier to tackle. Since oil pollution from ships would
be dealt with at an Intergovernmental Maritime Consultative Organization
conference in 1973, dumping was left as the “last key maritime source” of
ocean pollution. The secretariat thus saw the possibility to “close off one
remaining source” and in this way demonstrate that governments were able
and willing to act (interview, Peter S. Thacher, August 14, 1991).
To help negotiations on the global ocean dumping convention, the secretariat
introduced the notion, innovated by lawyers and scientists within
the United Nations, that substances could be classified into so-called black
and gray lists by an international convention (interviews, Sachiko
Kuwabara, August 26 and 27, 1991). According to this notion, dumping
of blacklisted substances should be prohibited and special care should be
taken and permission should be given before graylisted substances were
dumped. 13 The secretariat recognized that categorizing substances on the
basis of available knowledge of their environmental impact in separate lists
annexed to the convention had several advantages. For one, the contents
of the lists could be updated and adjusted as new knowledge of pollutants
developed without it being necessary to negotiate the entire convention
text. This alone would mean a major innovation of the standard treaty
form. 14
Recent experiences showed that lack of knowledge about pollutants was
a significant barrier to international agreement. 15 The system of black and
gray lists also offered a solution to this problem in that the lack of complete
knowledge concerning the effects of pollutants on the marine environment
could be acknowledged without jeopardizing agreement. As one U.S. delegate
to the negotiations later described, this approach helped significantly
in overcoming this particular obstacle to agreement: “There was very little
disagreement over the scientific portions of the Convention. All accepted