7 - Future Generations Institutions to Implement International Obligations towards Future Generations

Summary

As a starting point, this chapter examines how frequently future generations language is used in international legal documents. It finds that in the last few decades surprisingly many binding and less-than-binding international legal documents – and not only environmental ones – refer to future generations. However, since these references are seldom made in the main body of the binding international treaties, the force of ‘future generations language’ is questionable. Even so, these declarations of the will of the international legal community impact laws on all levels, most importantly the use of future generations language in the national constitutions that were created or amended recently. Unfortunately, the impulse for development of international law on intergenerational justice has broken after the splendid years of the 1990s. The international community has experienced a significant decline in mentioning and dealing with future generations in the sources of international law since then. The negative socio-economic developments since the 1990s served as the major hindrance to continuation of intergenerational features in our laws, as policy focused elsewhere.