Fördelningen av våra vattendrag: en studie av det internationella stödet bakom principen om rättvis och rimlig användning

Sammanfattning: During the last few decades, the law on the non-navigational uses of international watercourses has been the subject of codification and progressive development under the auspices of the ILC and the UN. This work resulted in the adoption of the UNWC by the UN General Assembly 21 May 1997, and the UNWC has been open to join since that date. At the core of the convention lies the principle of equitable and reasonable utilization that decides how and how much the states who share an international watercourse can use these shared resources. The principle of equitable and reasonable utilization is by most authors considered to be part of customary international law. It is also widely used in regional conventions. Despite this, and an almost unanimous support for the UNWC in the General Assembly in 1997, the convention has not yet received the required amount of ratifications to enter into force. There does not appear to be a strong agreement on exactly how the principle is supposed to be formulated in practice. This paper treats the extent of international support for the principle of equitable and reasonable utilization. The purpose is to see what parts of and in what way the principle of equitable and reasonable utilization has enough international support to be considered part of customary international law. To answer these questions the paper treats the sources of customary international law. This is the presence of state practice and opinio juris. As there is an incredibly extensive source material the paper only treats the state practice and opinio juris of the riparian states of the Nile, Mekong and Danube. On this source material, the conclusion is drawn that there is a support for the principle of equitable and reasonable utilization in the way that it precludes the existence of various principles of absolute sovereignty. That means that there is support for a view that states that share international watercourses have to take each other into consideration when using their common resources. The second conclusion is that the principle of equitable and reasonable utilization tells us very little about how to utilize international watercourses in specific cases, and that this is the way the principle is supposed to work. The implementation of the principle of equitable and reasonable utilization requires cooperation between riparian states. That is why it is rather the rules that lay the groundwork for such cooperation that guarantee a utilization of international watercourses that is equitable and reasonable.