Common Contracts
1 similar Paris Agreement contracts
The Legal Character of the Paris AgreementParis Agreement • March 22nd, 2016
From start to finish, the question of legal form or character was central to the Paris negotiations. The final issue decided at the 2011 Durban Conference, when the negotiations began, concerned the legal form of the instrument to be developed. And the last issue decided in Paris, when the negotiations concluded, concerned the legal character of one of the Paris Agreement’s provisions. In both cases, the question of legal character was resolved obliquely – in Durban, by adopting a formulation whose meaning no one understood, and in Paris by correcting an error in the text, which had converted a provision intended to be non-binding into a binding obligation, by using the verb ‘shall’ rather than ‘should’.
