CYIL vol. 14 (2023)

JAKUB HANDRLICA CYIL 14 (2023) states like Canada and the United States preferred to establish their own regimes of nuclear liability, based on bilateral agreements. Other states preferred to develop their nuclear programmes without being part of any international regime of nuclear liability at all. Recently, this is the case of China. 68 3. A Triumph of Regionalism (?) While the original intention of the Vienna Convention was to establish a worldwide regime of nuclear liability, covering both nuclear and non-nuclear states, the map of the Contracting Parties, as shown sixty years after its adoption, presents quite a different picture. Instead of a coherent map of states covered by the international regime of the Convention, we see several regions, covered by this regime of nuclear liability. The first of these regions was formed in Central and Eastern Europe. As already mentioned above, Yugoslavia was the only state in this area that signed and ratified the Vienna Convention before the collapse of the Soviet bloc. However, since the 1990s, a number of post-Soviet states in the Central and Eastern Europe have joined the regime of the Vienna Convention. In this region, the Convention has attracted the interest of both major nuclear 69 and non-nuclear states. 70 The second of these regions currently exists in the Middle East. Another such region may be found around the Gulf of Guinea in Western Africa, where states such as Cameroon, Nigeria, Ghana and Benin are participating in the Vienna Convention. Also here, the regions covered by the Vienna Convention are rather compact and do include both nuclear and non-nuclear states. 71 In Latin America and South-east Asia, similar compact regions have emerged to be covered by the Vienna Convention. 72 The fact is that in neither of these regions does the Vienna Convention exist alone. In all of them, the regime of the Vienna Convention co-exists with other international instruments on nuclear liability. These co-existences will be addressed in the following chapters. 3.1 The Vienna Convention and the Revised Vienna Convention As for the adequacy of the liability framework, the need to revise the Vienna Convention became obvious after the Chernobyl accident. 73 Discussions especially centred on the amount of the operator’s liability and on the desirability of ensuring additional compensation for damage exceeding that amount out of national and international public funds. Further, Germany against the backdrop of international law, Dissertation, Law Faculty of Law, University of Cape Town, 2018, at pp. 57–58. 68 See ZHOU, Y., RENGIFO, C., CHEN, P., HINZE, J. Is China ready for its nuclear expansion? (2011) 39 Energy Policy, at pp. 771–781. 69 Russian Federation, Ukraine, Belarus, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania and Bulgaria. 70 Estonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina. 71 See HANDRLICA, J. Mirage of Universalism in International Nuclear Liability Law: A Critical Assesment 10 Years after Fukushima (2021) 30 Review of European, Comparative & International Environmental Law, at pp. 375–386. 72 See HEFFRON, R., J., ASHLEY, S., F., NUTTALL, F., J. The global nuclear liability regime post Fukushima Daiichi (2016) 90 Progress in Nuclear Energy, at pp. 1–10. 73 See LAMM, V. The Protocol Amending the 1963 Vienna Convention (1998) Nuclear Law Bulletin , at pp. 7–9. Also see IAEA (ed), The 1997 Vienna Convention on Civil Liability for Nuclear Damage and the 1997 Convention on Supplementary Compensation for Nuclear Damage – Explanatory Texts , Vienna: IAEA, 2007.

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