介绍:
(c) Review and reports. The concern of the Group of Experts to address all situations involving spent fuel or radioactive waste satisfactorily by opting for a convention with a broad field of application would not, in its view, lead to systematic duplication of review procedures conducted under the two Conventions for States party to both.
The risk of duplication of review procedures arises for the case of spent fuel and radioactive waste located at the site of a facility covered by the Nuclear Safety Convention. It does not arise in the case of decommissioning since in this respect the Joint Convention will not apply cumulatively, but will take over at the point (approval of the decommissioning programme) where the Nuclear Safety Convention ceases to apply.
In the first instance, that of spent fuel or radioactive waste located at a power plant site, the Group of Experts thought that the problem might be settled as follows. The Nuclear Safety Convention as well as the Joint Convention will in effect be implemented through review meetings, held at regular intervals, during which the contracting parties will review and discuss the national reports prepared by each of them on the measures taken to fulfil every obligation listed in the Convention. 11
For the detailed implementation of the review process, it is provided that once the Joint Convention enters into force the contracting parties will adopt rules of procedure and financial rules for the review meetings. This was done in April 1997 on the occasion of the first meeting of the contracting parties to the Nuclear Safety Convention.
The Group of Experts considered that it was in the context of rules of procedure to be adopted by the contracting parties to the Joint Convention that the provisions preventing the contracting parties to both Conventions from duplicating unnecessarily the national reports and review meetings concerning spent fuel and radioactive waste at a power plant site could be inserted.
2. 1989 Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Waste and their Disposal and the Directive 92/3/Euratom of 3 February 1992
(a) Importance of a mandatory international instrument. One issue which was closely examined from the legal and the political standpoint concerns the regime applicable to the transfer of spent fuel and radioactive waste beyond national boundaries.
As soon as the negotiations began, the experts′ attention was drawn to the need to impose a binding legal regime on transboundary movements of radioactive waste. Some ambiguity concerning the international regime applicable was noted. The Basel Convention on the Control of Transboundary Movements of Hazardous Waste and their Disposal states in Article 1.3 that: "wastes which, as a result of being radioactive, are subject to other international control systems, including international instruments, applying specifically to radioactive materials, are excluded from the scope of this Convention". As a result of this provision, one year later a Code of Practice for the International Transboundary Movement of Radioactive Waste was adopted by the IAEA. 12
The question before the Group of Experts was to decide whether the Code of Practice, being an instrument of a non-binding nature, could fulfil the requirements contained in Article 1.3 of the Basel Convention and therefore avoid the application of the Convention′s regime to transfers of radioactive waste across national borders. A group of legal experts met separately and reached the conclusion that Article 1.3 did not require the adoption of a mandatory international instrument However, the group agreed on the importance of going a step further and creating a binding regime by the inclusion of a specific provision on transboundary movements in the Joint Convention.
