Climate change “conditionality”: the case for bundling the fate of international-trade legal obligations and climate-change-relevant legal obligations

Abstract

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This paper intends to make a contribution to the global debate on climate change mitigation by suggesting the transposition of a peculiar human rights-enhancing notion (developed by the European Institutions over the past three decades) towards the intersection between international trade law and climate change issues. The said notion, “conditionality”, is a practice which entails that the obligations assumed by the EU in the international cooperation and development agreements it signs with developing countries are conditional on those recipients’ continuous and clear respect of basic human rights. This paper’s hypothesis is that if obligations in cooperation and development agreements can be made conditional on the respect by other parties of human rights, then obligations in international trade agreements can be made conditional on the respect by other parties of their respective climate change obligations. In other words, “climate change conditionality” would mean that there would be no free-trade benefits without effective fulfilment of international climate-change-related obligations. The feasibility of this idea will be assessed via the textual analysis of the current wording and content of environmental/climate-change-related elements already present in a sample of relatively recent and/or upcoming free-trade agreements. This exercise intends to ascertain whether elements already present therein may be used to build climate change conditionality upon them.