Trade and UN SDGs 2030: The Interplay between Public International Law and Contract Law

The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development recognises international trade as a vector for delivering the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). To pursue the achievement of these goals in trade regulation and trade transactions, each separate legal regime engages different subjects and uses different sources. This chapter seeks to bring to light the intermingling and interaction between domestic and international law, and between public and private law, when it comes to achieving sustainability through international trade. Socio-environmental interests can be incorporated in the regulation of trade through international treaties. In addition, international soft law including principles, guidelines and codes of conduct – mainly developed by international organisations – attempts to direct the behaviour of both States and traders, encouraging voluntary compliance or inspiring business conduct. In implementing their international obligations, States may adopt internal regulations to shape the business environment; some unilateral regulations are able to reach activities that are outside a State’s territorial jurisdiction. Traders, whose transnational activities specifically affect the achievement of non-economic interests, while not being legal subjects of international trade law, are the principal subjects of domestic legal orders under which they may be held liable. Traders’ interactions are governed by contract law. Economic operators have increasingly incorporated sustainability into their supply contracts; sustainability has thus reached the stage of a binding, private-to-private legal source – the contract – although this contractualisation of sustainability presents enforcement issues. Conceptualising the dynamics involving subjects and sources across different legal regimes may assist in understanding how to improve the delivery of SDGs in global trade. Public international law and comparative private law, as different fields of scholarship, offer separate analyses. Arguably, the legal solutions they envisage within their respective regimes can be considered complementary to each other or may suggest that innovative repackaging of public and private law is needed to accommodate environmental and trade interests within the perspective of sustainability. In these brief reflections, the chapter attempts to address the interplay between public international law and private law on trade and sustainability. Section II and III analyse how public international law and private law currently accommodate sustainable development goals. Section IV discusses the extent to which contractual, domestic and international legal sources interact and shape each other in this respect.