Domestic Implications of International Treaty-Making: The Basel Convention & Hazardous Waste

1/4 Please read the Introductory Note by Katherina Kummer Peiry and text of the 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Waste and their Disposal.

2/4 Please read as general background “The International Control of Hazardous Waste,” in Birnie & Boyle, International Law and the Environment 300-44 (1992) [read only 332-43, since here we are only concerned with hazardous waste transfer]

3/4 Read also for local color re continuing resistance in developing countries to importing industrialized/OECD country waste:

• a. “Malaysia uncovers largest abandoned shipment of illegal toxic waste from Romania” (Reuters, 07/19/20)
• b. Septiari, “Two Singaporeans named suspects in toxic waste import case” (Jakarta Post, 10/04/19)
• c. Boediwardhana, “After plastic, Indonesia now also returns contaminated paper waste to Australia” (Jakarta Post, 07/09/19)
• d. Newsdesk, “‘Why do you always export your waste to my country’: Indonesian pre-teen writes to Trump” (Jakarta Post, 07/13/19)

4/4 From the Basel Action Network (“BAN”), a Seattle-based NGO, scan:

• a. Electronics Stewardship: BAN protects people and the planet from the toxic components within electronic waste”
• b. BAN e-Trash Transparency Project: The public has a right to know (BAN has been working on the Basel Convention and compliance for a number of years, but achieved notoriety 4-5 years ago when they implanted tracking devices in circa 200 outdated printers, monitors, computers and the like to see where e-waste supposedly responsibly recycled under various highly lauded programs actually wound up– they delivered the e-waste items to designated recycling locations, but then tracked them via the tracking devices to their final locations, causing a certain amount of embarrassment among the sponsors of said responsible recycling like Dell, for those of you using Dell computers)