Export Control and Dual Use of Space Technologies
- Paper number
IAC-05-E6.4.12
- Author
Ms. Amal Rakibi, IDEST- CNRS, France
- Year
2005
- Abstract
With the disappearance of the bipolar world of the Cold War, the club of the space powers widened. New actors, as well public as private appeared. Since a few years, the governmental programs have joined to private operators for economic profitability reasons. This change of prospects reveals new legal problems. If, space law is by nature public international law, because it regulates the national activities, it also envisages an implicit recognition of the control of the activities of national companies by public entities. The privatisation of the space activities is thus framed by the public powers. But the regulation of the space activities encounters a major difficulty: the dual use of space technologies. For example, in the field of remote sensing, the same space technology, can sometimes provide weather data or information relating to the protection of the natural resources, sometimes informs in period of crisis the armies about the positions of the enemy soldiers. Stem from the same technology, there is not clear separation between the military space applications and the civil space applications. But taking into account the strategic and political stakes of space, the states covet the exclusiveness in some activities, especially the military activities, such as the launching and the exploitation of observations satellites, or communications satellites used by the national armies. Thus, national control, as regards export of technologies towards foreign states, encounters difficulties because of the dual use of the space applications, of which the principal risk is a military use, by the State of destination, intended initially for a civil use. Consequently, only a strict official regulation of the commercialisation of space technologies by private companies, would make it possible to limit the increase of the military application of space technologies by any potential competitor. This national control goes against the bases of space law, especially freedom of outer space (which includes freedom of access, of scientific investigation and of commercial uses), of which the corollaries are the peaceful use and the international co-operation. The problem is that there is a constant tension between : the needs of the exporting states’s industries to export and the will of the States to restrict the exportations of sensitives tehnologies as much as possible to preserve their security. According to the space powers, the problem is not apprehended in the same way ( question of the extraterritoriality of the export control). The more so as the current international political context is not favorable to the “liberalization” of the exportations. However, if it is necessary to allow, indeed to support the private activities, it is necessary to take care not to harm the principles which had been accepted from the very start of the space conquest. The dual use of space technologies, with the duality of the actors, is thus an innovative subject, insofar as it re-opens the whole question of the corpus juris spatialis inherited from the Cold war. The legal status applicable to dual technologies remains a hybrid system, which does not profit from the flexibility of the regulation of civils applications, that when there are neither political stakes, nor important economic stakes.
- Abstract document
- Manuscript document
IAC-05-E6.4.12.pdf (🔒 authorized access only).
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