In Litigating the Environment: Process and Procedure Before International Courts and Tribunals (Edward Elgar, 2023), Dr Justine Bendel scrutinises how international courts and tribunals may respond procedurally to an ever-growing list of environmental disputes. In a time of environmental crisis, she lays crucial groundwork for strengthening the application of international environmental law, a topic of increasing relevance for global civil society.

Putting into perspective the practices of various international courts and tribunals, Dr Bendel works within the constraints of the existing judicial framework to sharpen international environmental justice and governance. She provides judges and litigators with tools that they can use when confronted with environmental disputes, to extract the best practices in the interest of improving environmental litigation for each phase of a judicial procedure.

In this podcast, Dr Bendel discusses the complexity of multiple legal, regulatory and guidance frameworks insofar as international environmental law is concerned. She explains how it is highly likely that the subject matter of an environmental dispute will cover common areas or resources that affect global or multilateral interests, which inevitably adds a political dimension to any dispute resolution when it comes to areas that transcend national jurisdictions. Dr Bendel explores how typically bilateral proceedings under international law might be expanded to accommodate the interests of other states – and non-state actors such as international non-governmental organisations – through creatively and flexibly adapting procedures that already exist before international courts and tribunals, including dispute resolution and non-compliance procedures. Now is the time, she says, for international courts and tribunals to be used to resolve environmental disputes and to make authoritative legal determinations on protecting the planet and its precious resources.

Alex Batesmith is a Lecturer in Legal Profession at the School of Law, University of Leeds, UK. His research focuses on lawyers, their professional self-identity and their motivations, and how these shape the institutions and the discipline in which they work. He has a particular interest in, and practitioner experience of, international criminal law and transitional justice. Twitter: @batesmith

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