LLM Group 6 Environment and Legal Order Environment and International Legal Order 2025-26 Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: the question yokes two things the instruments keep apart, natural heritage and cultural heritage, and the marks are in showing why the 1972 Convention treats them as one subject and what environmental degradation does to each. A list of threats will earn about a third. Organise the answer by the KIND of pressure: development, climate, armed conflict, tourism, and the money and capacity gap. Work at least three cases properly, put the Indian material in, and end by saying where the international framework actually fails, because the delistings show that it does.

The single Convention that treats both as one subject

The governing instrument is the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage, adopted by the General Conference of UNESCO on 16 November 1972 and in force from 17 December 1975. India accepted it in 1977. Its architecture answers the question before the challenges are reached, because it explains why a paper on international environmental law asks about cathedrals as well as wetlands.

Two enforcement devices matter. Article 11(4) allows the Committee to place a property on the List of World Heritage in Danger, which today carries more than fifty entries. Article 15 creates the World Heritage Fund. Beyond those, the Convention has no sanction at all except deletion from the List, which has happened three times: the Arabian Oryx Sanctuary in Oman in 2007 after the State cut the sanctuary by ninety per cent when oil was found, the Dresden Elbe Valley in Germany on 25 June 2009 over a bridge through the valley, and Liverpool Maritime Mercantile City on 21 July 2021 for irreversible loss of the attributes that carried its value.

Challenge one: development pressure, and how the Taj was saved

The commonest and hardest pressure is that heritage sits where people want to build, quarry, refine and drive. The Indian answer to it is the Taj Trapezium litigation.

In M.C. Mehta v. Union of India, (1997) 2 SCC 353, the petitioner complained that sulphur dioxide from foundries, chemical industries, a refinery at Mathura and the brick kilns around Agra was combining with atmospheric moisture and falling as acid rain on the Taj Mahal, yellowing and pitting the marble. The evidence was expert rather than eyewitness: reports of the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute and of the Varadarajan Committee.

Challenge two: climate change, which is now an obligation and not merely a threat

Climate change reaches natural heritage through coral bleaching, glacial retreat, changed fire regimes and species range shifts, and cultural heritage through sea level rise, salt damage, flooding and extreme rainfall. The Sundarbans, inscribed in 1987 and shared between India and Bangladesh, is the standing Indian illustration, exposed to sea level rise, salinity ingress and cyclones at once.

What changed in 2025 is that this stopped being only a conservation problem. In its Advisory Opinion on the Obligations of States in respect of Climate Change of 23 July 2025, the International Court of Justice held unanimously that States carry legal obligations to protect the climate system from anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, that those obligations arise from customary law as well as from the treaties, and that they are not exhausted by the Paris Agreement. Ninety eight States and thirteen international organisations took part, which is the largest participation in the Court's history.

The punitive register produced Prosecutor v. Ahmad Al Faqi Al Mahdi, International Criminal Court, judgment of 27 September 2016. The accused led a morality brigade in Timbuktu, a World Heritage property, and directed the destruction of nine mausoleums and the door of a mosque in June and July 2012. He pleaded guilty to the war crime of intentionally directing attacks against buildings dedicated to religion and historic monuments under Article 8(2)(e)(iv) of the Rome Statute and was sentenced to nine years. On 17 August 2017 the Court made a reparations order of about 2.7 million euros, holding that the harm ran not only to the immediate community but to the international community as a whole. It is the first conviction anywhere for destroying cultural heritage as a war crime, and it converts an Article 6 duty of cooperation into a personal liability.

Challenge four: money, capacity, tourism and the ownership problem

The ownership problem is sharper. The Convention keeps sovereignty intact, so the international community may list, monitor, advise and finally delete, and may do nothing else. Oman reduced its sanctuary by ninety per cent and the only consequence was removal from a list.

The Indian framework, and why it is the better model

India carries 44 World Heritage properties, the most recent being the Maratha Military Landscapes of India, twelve forts of which eleven are in Maharashtra and one in Tamil Nadu, inscribed at the 47th session of the Committee in July 2025.

Domestically the protection runs on four tracks. The Constitution supplies Article 48A and Article 51A(f) and (g), the duties to protect the environment and to value and preserve the composite culture. The Ancient Monuments and Archaeological Sites and Remains Act, 1958, as amended in 2010, creates the National Monuments Authority and the prohibited area of 100 metres and regulated area of a further 200 metres around a protected monument. The Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, supplies the area notifications, of which the Taj Trapezium Zone notification is the model. The writ jurisdiction supplies the remedy.

Where the framework fails

The case against the present system has to be put at its strongest. First, listing is a reward that increases the very tourism pressure it is meant to guard against, and no instrument controls visitor numbers. Second, the Danger List is treated by States as a reputational insult rather than a rescue mechanism, so governments lobby against listing their own sites and the Committee has become political. Third, the Convention has one sanction, deletion, and it is self defeating, because a delisted site loses monitoring and assistance at the moment it most needs them. Fourth, natural heritage is protected by an instrument that predates the whole modern apparatus of biodiversity law and sits awkwardly beside the Convention on Biological Diversity of 1992 and the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands of 2 February 1971. Fifth, climate change is the one pressure that no site manager can address at the site, so the 2025 Advisory Opinion, welcome as it is, relocates the remedy to a forum the custodian community cannot reach.