ntrol over the interpretation and the implementation of rules. One of the main characteristics - and one of the causes of the shortcomings - of international law is that although these functions exist, there are no corresponding organs that would ensure them on a generally obligatory basis. Law-making is still an occasional operation, based on the will of states; there is no executive power in the international field and international jurisdiction can only function with the consent of the concerned governments. Thus, modifications in the functions of international law may have a different scope than in the national legal systems.
Two aspects of such modifications due to global change seem to be of particular significance: the modifications in the law-making process on one side, and those in the implementation of rules on the other.
A. Implications of global change for the law-making process
The most dramatic change that occurred in international relations in the second half of the century was the expansion of the realm of international legal rules. These now cover large fields that formerly either fell into the exclusive jurisdiction of states, or did not exist at all as a matter for legal regulation. Examples are numerous in both categories. One may mention for the first field the protection of human rights, the improvement of labour conditions, health care, in addition to a number of economic activities; while for the second field one immediately thinks of the development of poor countries, the control of the production, trade, and use of drugs, the fight against terrorism and, of course, the protection of the environment.
It must be noted that in all these fields bilateral cooperation, which has been the general rule for international law, now only plays a secondary role: most actions need a multilateral approach. It seems that this fact is not sufficiently well understood. Environmental protection is a good example. At the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, when growing environmental awareness had made it necessary to envisage the problem of international protection of the environment, the first approach of most international lawyers was to consider the problem as a conflict between two sovereignties caused by transfrontier pollution. Although, in order to face the more and more numerous environmental problems, multilateral conventions were multiplied in the 1970s and 1980s, even now there is a general trend among international lawyers to limit their approach to a rather archaic bilateral one. The evolution and broadening of the minds in this field should certainly be one of the consequences of global change.
As far as international legislation is concerned, the most obvious consequence of global change is the rapidly growing number of multilateral treaties, often covering fields and problems that either did not exist or have not formerly been discovered.
The complexity of such problems leads to a second consequence, which was hardly understood at the beginning. At a certain stage of the law-making process, problem areas cannot be treated separately. The first approaches to environmental protection were essentially sectorial: separate norms and rules were adopted for continental waters, the sea, atmospheric pollution, and wildlife conservation. An important step forward was the terminology used in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea,4 which speaks of the protection and preservation of the marine environment. Apparently, this means more than only the water of the sea. Moreover, Article 195 of the Convention imposes upon states the duty "not to transfer, directly or indirectly, damage or hazards from one area to another or transform one type of pollution into another."5 Thus the interconnection between different components of the environment has been recognized.
The following stage in this evolution was the understanding that, although sectorial approaches to environmental problems- handling separately water pollution,6 sea pollution,7 air pollution,8 and wildlife conservation9 - are still important, 