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rights of present and future generations and act as an environmental watchdog, alerting governments and citizens to any emerging threats.
5.2. A Universal Declaration and a Convention on Environmental Protection and Sustainable Development
85. Building on the 1972 Stockholm Declaration, the 1982 Nairobi Declaration, and many existing international conventions and General Assembly resolutions, there is now a need to consolidate and extend relevant legal principles in a new charter to guide state behaviour in the transition to sustainable development. It would provide the basis for, and be subsequently expanded into, a Convention, setting out the sovereign rights and reciprocal responsibilities of all states on environmental protection and sustainable development. The charter should prescribe new norms for state ad interstate behaviour needed to maintain livelihoods and life on our shared planet, including basic norms for prior notification, consultation, and assessment of activities likely to have an impact on neighbouring states or global commons. These could include the obligation to alert and inform neighbouring states in the event of an accident likely to have a harmful impact on their environment. Although a few such norms have evolved in some bilateral and regional arrangements, the lack of wider agreement on such basic rules for interstate behaviour undermines both the sovereignty and economic development potential of each and all states.
86. We recommend that the General Assembly commit itself to preparing a universal Declaration and later a Convention on environmental protection and sustainable development. A special negotiating group could be established to draft a Declaration text for adoption in 1988. Once it is approved, that group could then proceed to prepare a Convention, Based on and extending the principles in the Declaration, with the aim of having an agreed Convention text ready for signature by states within three to five years. To facilitate the early launching of that process the Commission has submitted for consideration by the General Assembly, and as a starting point for the deliberations of the special negotiating Group, a number of proposed legal principles embodied in 22 Articles which were prepared by its group of international legal experts. These proposed principles are submitted to assist the General Assembly in its deliberations and have not been approved or considered in detail by the Commission. A summary of the principles and Articles appears as Annexe 1 of this report.
5.3 Strenqthen and Extend Existing International Conventions and Agreements
87. In parallel governments should accelerate their efforts to strengthen and extend existing and more specific international conventions and cooperative arrangements by:
- acceding to or ratifying existing global and regional conventions dealing with environment and development, and applying them with more rigour and rigour;
