ECSL Encyclopaedia

Welcome to the ECSL’s Encyclopaedia of space law terms. This will become a very useful tool for students, professors, practitioners and, in general, people coming from all kinds of space-related fields.

This Encyclopaedia intends to be a multilingual project and counts on both your collaboration and active participation. Your contributions will be essential-.
Basically we should try to reach consensus on those terms whose sense vary depending on both language used and different authors, leading to misunderstanding and controversy.

This page should be a meeting point for debate on the understanding/implementation of the terms that we will propose here every month. The fact that this tool will be build by all of us is a guaranty for achieving high quality results i.e. concepts generally accepted at worldwide level.

What are the aims?

• Provide with a general view of those space law terms whose meaning very from one language to another. Ex. « Apanage de la humanité » , “Patrimonio común de la humanidad”, “Province of all mankind-Common heritage of mankind”.

   

• Work on those terms in which no consensus exists, -actually under doctrinal debate- by offering you several descriptions about the same concept and by asking you to send us your own ideas. Ex. Peaceful uses, space object…etc.

   

• Elaborate a kind of questionnaire about the most important concepts (to be filled out by the ECSL Board members, Professors, students and practitioners).

   

• Publish in a brochure all terms and definitions we have agreed upon

After this short presentation of our idea, I wonder myself…Why not begin with the term “space law”? Does a definition already exists? What is “Space Law”?

For any proposal about a term to be considered or for publish your own work on a specific definition, please send a mail to:karolina.rybarova@esa.int or ecsl@esa.int