Climate change laws: A necessity or a normative newfangledness: Examples of Serbia and Croatia

Abstract

The paper commences with the fact that in the last thirty years, many regulatory acts have been passed world-wide seeking to regulate various climate change-related issues. Some countries have also adopted special laws on climate change (leges speciales). The first part of the paper is devoted to considering the international legal context of climate change, as a general circumstance of importance for understanding the practice of states in adopting legal regulations in this area. In the second part of the paper, the key elements of internal legal regulations in the field of climate change in the Republic of Serbia (RS) and the Republic of Croatia (RC) are pointed out and the elementary norms of the Serbian Law on Climate Change and the Croatian Law on Climate Change and Ozone Layer Protection are compared. The aim of the paper is to analyse the connections between international legal circumstances and the manner of regulating the area of climate change via leges speciales. The thesis that the circumstances related to the complex nature of international legal obligations in this area, as well as obligations from EU regulations, influenced the need to regulate these issues with special laws has been considered.

Keywords

• climate change
• international law
• eu
• serbia
• croatia