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266 Protection of Invertebrates in the Legal Regulation of the European Union Abstract In recent years, studies on the population trends of insects and other invertebrates reported widespread declines most pronounced in intensely developed regions, such as Europe. The likely causes include various activities of the industrial society, including agriculture, urbanisation, forestry, and commercial fishing. Most of these activities are governed by, inter alia, legislation on the EU level. This thesis argues that even though there are no completely white spaces in the EU law and relevant legislation addresses most of the important areas of invertebrate conservation, the current legislation is not comprehensive and inclusive enough. The arguments for this conclusion are derived from the analysis of the current EU legislation in the face of the biological context of invertebrates. In Part I, the contextual framework for the analysis is built up by outlining the presented problem of declining invertebrate populations. A short introduction to the taxonomy and ecology of invertebrates is followed by a summary of the environmental threats they currently face. The threats are matched to the corresponding EU legislation, thereby laying out the structure of Part II. The second part includes chapters on the relevant...

85 11 Abstract Deep Seabed Mining in the Area: Environmental Aspects of the Legal Framework The thesis focuses on the environmental aspects of regulation of deep-seabed mining in areas outside national jurisdictions, collectively referred to as the Area. Deep Seabed Mining (DSBM) is a potential future method of commercial extraction of non-renewable resources, metals and rare earths, collectively referred to as Minerals, conducted at depths between one and six kilometres below the ocean surface. Like all other mining operations, these activities would affect the surrounding ecosystems and the ocean environment as a whole, which is already under considerable pressure from other human activities. Effective protection of the marine environment therefore requires sophisticated legislative and policy framework to avoid irreversible and unacceptable consequences, including loss of genetic resources, biodiversity and deepening threats to climate stability. The diverse set of rules that govern the DBSM has been shaped over the last 50 years by various interest groups and under the influence of the latest scientific knowledge and technological developments. Its backbone are the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and the 1994 Implementation Agreement. The provisions of Part XI of UNCLOS...

Climate change has proven to be a real threat to human rights over the past years. The complex and layered link has been acknowledged, explored and nowadays it represents a justly feared aspect of climate change. Intentions of not only scientific, but also scholarly society has been therefore spinning around the question, how to stop the dangers stemming from the climate change and prevent further human rights violations. A climate litigation, born in the USA, and having spread the idea around the world seems to be one of the options to (partly) resolve the situation. The trend has been expanding over the past years and has become a phenomenon. Elderly, children and farmers take not only states, but also the biggest private emitters of GHGs known as Carbon Majors to court. The main objective of this thesis has been to discover the way to success in climate litigation cases based on human rights argumentation. The aim has been to generate an exemplary set of advices for drafters aiming at filing a climate lawsuit. Together with this question, the author had a particular interest in assessing the capability of human rights arguments to succeed on its own without additional support from other legal areas, such as tort law. The leading methodology used in this thesis was a comparison of legal arguments...

The first chapter of this thesis discusses the recent development of climate change law. It explores the reason as to why it is at the centre of a global debate, which is predominantly due the increasingly pronounced consequences of climatic changes on human society and the environment. Furthermore, it describes the most important requirements in tackling the issues presented by international climate change treaties. This includes the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, acting as a base for the whole international climate change regime, the Kyoto Protocol as a legal tool with specified emission targets and most recently, the Paris Agreement, which serves as an independent international treaty however is still under the guidance of the framework convention. The author predicts that the Paris Agreement will determine the future direction of this legal field and therefore puts particular focus on this treaty in the first chapter of the thesis. The paper aims to uncover its weaknesses - questioning the enforceability of some of the measures that rely on the autonomy of states to implement and the lack of ambition in some of its targets. The second chapter expands on one of the key issues related to the main topic. The author emphasizes how the importance of environmentally friendly...