SATELLITE EVIDENCE IN INTERNATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

MAUREEN WILLIAMS

EVIDENCE FROM EARTH OBSERVATION SATELLITES, Ed. Ray Purdy and Denide Leung)

Martinus Nijhoff Publishers

Lugar: Leiden; Año: 2013; p. 195 - 217

When the UN Principles Relating to Remote Sensing of the Earth from Space were adopted in 1976 at the Forty-first Session of the UN General Assembly the development of this technology and the speed with which it grew were hardly in the mind of its drafters let alone the international community, or the man in the street. Nowadays in most countries ?industrialised or otherwise- the use Earth Observation Satellites (EOS) is part of routine.  The access of developing countries to remote sensing technologies went a long way in meeting the challenge of the time by creating a unity of action to give them, collectively, a place in space activities which, individually, was beyond their reach. They did not, however, at the beginning, press this issue to extremes. The process was gradual and their guiding light international cooperation. Indeed at this point in time we are all immersed in a completely new scenario where the applications of these new space technologies are growing by leaps and bounds. This situation, in turn, indicates that new law to be created and, at the same time, the fundamental principles of international law be strengthened.