The Legal Personality of the Conference of Parties to the United Nations Climate Change Regime Treaties (Max Planck Institute for Innovation & Competition Research Paper, No. 23-24), 2023, 19
The Conference of Parties (CoP) serving the United Nations climate change regime treaties – the Framework Convention on Climate Change, the Kyoto Protocol, and the Paris Agreement – is responsible for promoting the effective implementation of these treaties. Actions it has undertaken to fulfil this duty include cooperating with other legal persons via binding agreements, creating mechanisms for facilitating the compliance with obligations under the climate change regime treaties, and creating an international institution with legal personality – the Green Climate Fund. The diversity and the nature of its actions bring about an interesting legal question of whether the CoP itself possesses legal personality. This question is also linked to the effectiveness of the climate change regime as the CoP is tasked with the facilitation of the implementation of the regime treaties. This article analyses the legal personality of the CoP by three criteria extracted from the Advisory Opinion of the International Court of Justice on the Reparation for Injuries case, and the subsequent scholarly literature.
