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29/10/2015
Gérardine Goh: ‘A whole constellation of technology is orbiting the Earth’
On 23 October, Dr Gérardine Goh Escolar was appointed senior researcher at the Instituto Carlomagno de Estudios Europeos (ICEE). The doctor, a lawyer by profession, is the legal advisor to the president of Iran-United States Claims Tribunal and a leading expert on outer space law. On the occasion of her appointment, and as part of the Faculty of Law's continuous learning cycle, she gave a lecture entitled “Regulating Humanity’s Greatest Adventure: International Law and Outer Space”.
The new ICEE researcher started the conference with the following questions: “Why is space adventure important? Does anyone here use a mobile telephone, watch television or follow the weather forecasts?”
She explained that there is a tendency to think that the space race only consists of taking Man to remote places and that as far as the conquest of outer space is concerned we are still children looking up at the stars. And yet humanity has already expanded into outer space as a matter of routine and today it is an unquestionable fact that, in Goh’s words, "a whole constellation of technology is orbiting the Earth” to make our everyday lives possible.
Spain, she said, “is not exempt from this reality and as a member of the European Space Agency (ESA) participates in and heads up projects being developed along with the other 21 member states. She explained that every euro invested in the ‘space race’, 64,000 million last year alone, brings a return of 2000% to industry. Furthermore, Spain has two ESA centres: a data management one in Madrid and an ideas laboratory in Barcelona.
She also asserted that “regulation needs to be implemented.” Above and beyond Public Law which establishes who has access to outer space and the ban on the use of force enshrined in the United Nations Charter, work is continuing today on establishing extra-contractual responsibility.
In this respect, Goh explained that private companies needing to put space technology into orbit organise the launch through space agencies. And through these agencies, the nations involved assume full and objective responsibility for any damage caused to the Earth or its environment, without the need to establish guilt or negligence. In the case of material damages in outer space, subjective guilt applies but not liability, as this continues to be applied to the nation responsible for the launch, regardless of the private or public nature of whoever was behind it.
This link to nations, the expert concluded, guarantees that the benefits obtained from space exploration will contribute to the good of all because, as the United Nations established in the 1970s, space and the celestial bodies are the common heritage of all mankind.