Een onderzoek naar juridische definities en daarmee samenhangende aspecten van ruimtepuin en actieve sanering

The overarching objective of the proposed research is (i) to provide a critical and fundamental assessment of public international law on outer space as it relates to space debris and (ii) to investigate how and to what extent this legal regime can be improved upon to better serve the goal of long-term sustainability of outer space activities. Underlying this research proposal, is the basic assumption that the current framework of international law on outer space is lacking on multiple fronts in order for actors to implement solutions to the space debris conundrum within a legal regime that offers sufficient certainty and clarity. After extensive research and evaluation, new legal considerations and important identified elements and parameters for circumscribing much-needed legal terms of art will be put forth that will contribute to regulating space debris and ADR in a more substance-specific manner in international law. Specifically, the proposed project comprises three specific research objectives.

The first objective is to research and assess the required aspects of legal definitional contours of space debris through incorporating objective (technical) and subjective (‘actor decides’) legal ‘criteria of functionality’ to define what constitutes debris within the space law framework.

The first objective is to comprehensively analyse and consequently propose inexorable elements for an international legal framework apropos space debris as a delineated legal concept, with specific focus on the UN Space Treaties. The guiding hypothesis in this first section is that the Space Treaties do not contain sufficiently developed concepts to accommodate debris or the solutions thereto. This constitutes a lacuna that impedes any progress on combating space debris through legal uncertainty and ambiguity, and that necessitates new and more abstract legal terms of art to be developed and promulgated in and by the international legal community.

Secondly, the research seeks to frame and analyse ADR by identifying and integrating technical and legal particularities of ADR in order to evaluate how these must influence an international regulatory framework on debris and ADR.

In the second objective, integrating the findings of the previous phase, the examination will focus on aspects of a legal definition and status of ADR. The underlying research hypothesis is that any definition(s) of ADR and any instrument regulating ADR must be developed from the use of certain technology, thus regulating certain activities or conduct in outer space with regard to ‘space debris’, and not the technology itself.

Thirdly, the proposal seeks to identify and assess international obligations on the prevention of transboundary harm and precaution for their impact and guidance on the legal consistency and validity of the previous results within the broader context of international (environmental) law, as well as to integrate them with the specific regime of fault-based liability in space law.

The third objective is to draw together the strings and verify the previous findings on debris and ADR against the broader context of public international law vis à vis international responsibility and liability of States. This, with a view to legally validate the results, as well as to extricate them from the purely political level of inter-State relations. Emphasis on obligations of prevention and precaution and the concept of transboundary harm in international environmental law, and their link with the fault-based liability regime for space activities, shall allow the research to (i) ascertain if and how responsibility and liability are triggered with regards to conduct related to whether debris is legally defined in an objective and/or State-subjective manner, and (ii) if and how international obligations compel States to certain use of ADR or conduct towards debris (e.g. ‘is there an obligation to appraise certain objects as debris?’). This will help further reiteratively refine the legal concepts advanced under the previous objectives. The underlying hypothesis is that positive international legal obligations already impose on States and their conduct certain requirements that must feed into any framework to be promulgated on the subjects under study, whether directly or mutatis mutandis. These obligations, moreover, can already be said to form part of international space law since international law sensu lato remains applicable in outer space pursuant to Article III of the Outer Space Treaty, or they can be seamlessly integrated with it, as a number of environmental principles already extend to the outer space realm.