Access to international courts and tribunals in environmental disputes: towards public interest litigation?

This paper focuses on the requirements attached to the entry into international litigation and their impact on environmental litigation. It responds the questions ‘who can bring a claim, and will any international tribunal accept it?’. The paper explores the potential transformation of interstate dispute settlement from being exclusively bilateral towards a procedure allowing public interests to be defended, in the enforcement of international environmental law. It aims at refuting the hasty assertion that international courts and tribunals have too narrow rules on standing to respond to environmental disputes. Therefore, in this paper I will analyse the notion of public interest in international law, its stakeholders and its legal implications for international adjudication in order to clarify the developments made by the judicial institutions and their impacts on environmental litigation.