Abstract

This paper analyses the contribution of treaty or specialised judicial bodies to striking problems such as fragmentation and inconsistency within International Environmental Law (IEL) as they fill the gaps in IEL, taking advantage of the absence of an overarching International Environmental Court (IEC) and the indolence of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). It argues that by helping improve the ICJ, they will help resolve IEL's jurisprudential inconsistency and fragmentation. The paper therefore first explains the sense in which jurisprudential fragmentation and inconsistency underline IEL's compliance mechanisms, and shows the limits of the state-centripetal approach of the ICJ as a solution to such a problem. Finally, it proposes a state-centrifugal paradigm that stresses how international specialised judicial bodies may help strengthen the ICJ's fragmentation and inconsistency management functions. To propose this novel approach, this paper employs legal critical methods to expose current gaps in the state-centripetal approach.

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