Talks and presentations.

Carbon dioxide removal is no longer a speculative proposition. The IPCC (2022) has identified it as a necessary component of pathways that limit warming to 1.5°C, and among the various CDR approaches under consideration, those that operate in the marine environment have attracted particular scientific and commercial attention in recent years. Yet virtually all of this activity takes place within national waters. The legal framework that would govern marine CDR (mCDR) in areas beyond national jurisdiction remains fragmented and internally contradictory.

Two recent legal developments have reshaped the regulatory landscape for mCDR in ABNJ, while a third, longer-running process has failed to keep pace. The BBNJ Agreement entered into force on 17 January 2026, establishing for the first time a binding environmental impact assessment framework for the high seas and the Area. Seven months before that, ITLOS delivered its Advisory Opinion in Case No. 31, characterising anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions as pollution of the marine environment under UNCLOS and imposing on States Parties a due diligence obligation that it described as ‘stringent.’ Against these advances, the London Protocol regime, administered by the IMO rather than under UNCLOS, continues its slow and incomplete evolution.

The paper argues that resolving the central tension — that mCDR may both serve states’ due diligence obligations to reduce marine pollution from greenhouse gases and itself constitute a new form of marine pollution under UNCLOS Article 1(1)(4) — requires treating the BBNJ Agreement’s EIA provisions as the procedural backbone and the ITLOS opinion’s due diligence standard as the normative compass, while relying on the London Protocol’s technical assessment frameworks for substantive guidance on individual techniques. The Saya de Malha Bank in the South West Indian Ocean serves as the case study.

The closing panel of the CCS at Sea conference draws together the day’s threads on the regulatory and governance challenges of carbon capture and storage at sea — cross-border transport of CO₂, multi-source pipeline cargoes and stream composition rules, the assignment of long-term stewardship and leakage liability, and the boundary between EU CCS Directive obligations and the international regimes (London Protocol, OSPAR, BBNJ) that overlap with it. The discussion takes the structural question forward: how the law should distribute the legal risk of an offshore CO₂ infrastructure that no single instrument was designed to govern.

This paper examines an emerging challenge in the CCS value chain: how to allocate responsibility when CO₂ from multiple emitters is physically blended and transported as a single maritime cargo. As Northern European CCS networks scale toward multi-source hubs and cross-border shipping routes, the physical commingling of CO₂ streams creates attribution problems across three regulatory domains.

First, the EU ETS establishes installation-level attribution through monitoring, reporting, and verification requirements, allowing operators to deduct captured CO₂ from compliance obligations. However, when blended cargoes suffer transport losses, the framework provides no mechanism for proportionately allocating leaked tonnage back to contributing emitters for allowance surrender. If five emitters ship blended CO₂ and two percent leaks in transit, existing rules cannot determine who surrenders allowances for those lost tonnes.

Second, multi-source operations expose private law gaps in contractual risk allocation. When individual CO₂ streams meet purity specifications but the blended cargo is rejected as off-spec, no established liability framework determines responsibility between contributing emitters, terminal operators, or transporters. Questions of contamination liability, indemnification for storage site damage, and force majeure allocation remain unresolved where fault cannot be attributed to a single party.

Third, cross-border shipments create jurisdictional ambiguity under instruments like the London Protocol and OSPAR. When cargo originates from multiple states, determining the ‘exporting State,’ allocating responsibility through the transport chain, and resolving whether ETS deductions apply for storage outside the ETS jurisdiction remain unclear.

The paper concludes that while existing frameworks support single-source CCS, multi-source operations require targeted regulatory clarification or standardised contractual frameworks to preserve accountability where physical traceability has been lost through blending.

The talk situated surrogacy at the intersection of medicine, ethics, and law. Framed against International Women’s Day, it opened on the autonomy questions that surrogacy raises for the women who carry, then traced the history of assisted reproduction from the pharmaceutical production of estrogen in 1936 through the first IVF birth in 1978, the first gestational surrogacy in 1985–86, the Baby M and Calvert v. Johnson cases, and Ukraine’s 2009 surrogacy law. From there it turned to the regulatory question for Turkey, addressing surrogacy as a hope for families — including queer families — for whom the existing Turkish legal framework has no place, set against the commercialisation and exploitation risks that the practice carries when women’s bodies become the medium of family formation.

An important area of application of robotics technologies is unmanned water-surface and underwater vehicles — for example in remote exploration work. The talk focused on the consequences of these technologies in a liability context: that because of the characteristics of these vehicles, especially autonomy, their development and increased use in the civil sector are likely to require a new approach other than the well-established fault-based liability regime, but that they are not expected to require amendments to the basic tenets of maritime law as illustrated, for instance, in the 1972 IMO COLREGs Convention. The argument was that even though most unmanned water-surface and underwater vehicles are becoming more and more autonomous, they are closer to reasonable safety when compared to the ultra-hazardous activity of unmanned aerial vehicles. The argument was developed further in the 2021 Springer chapter Lessons Learned from Robotics and AI in a Liability Context.

The conference paper that became the chapter Anthropomorphic Machines (Banja Luka 2020). The talk argued that human-robot interactions differ structurally from interactions with other artefacts because robots are autonomous, and that recent advances have enabled robots to take roles formerly thought of as human-only — companions, lovers, social interaction partners. Robot anthropomorphism — the attribution of human attitudes and emotions to robots — generates implications for individuals and society in the longer term, from the manipulation of emotional attachments to an expansion of existing privacy risks. The paper called for legal orders to stop treating robots as mere tools and to start treating them as parties to interactions, laying the groundwork for examining the legal problems arising from robot autonomy.

The talk treated robots as artefacts that work according to the sense-think-act paradigm, and argued that with their growing autonomy and emergence as alternatives to human companionship — pets, friends, confidants, romantic partners — they confront the self-understanding of human beings at both the individual and collective level, and the legal system that is designed in line with that self-understanding. From there it worked through the legal questions this opens up — chiefly anthropomorphism as a structural feature of human-machine interaction rather than an error to regulate away — and the implications for the legal order. The argument provided early ground for the doctoral work that followed.