The generation and international movement of hazardous wastes including their disposal in economically evolving world remains a topical issue in the environmental justice debate. Globally, it is estimated that more than 90 percent of wastes produced and traded annually are from industrialised nations. Most of these hazardous wastes are shipped to developing countries for recycling and disposal. The article argues that tightening of the weaker provisions of Basel Convention is urgently needed to assist the developing world, especially in Africa. This requires both technical transfer and capacity building given the consequences of hazardous wastes to human health and environment. Similarly, the Prior Informed Consent (PIC) procedure should be upgraded to meet the sound Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) standard. This entails evaluating the potential risk and ability, thus allowing the importing countries to make an informed decision. The implication of this is that Basel has the potential to promote environmental justice if the key institutional reforms are made without a total ban on wastes trade in developing world.

The World environment is exposed to myriads of challenges impacting it negatively. Man, plant and the living resources of the environment are eventually the victim of the challenges faced by the environment. One of these challenges is the effects of hazardous wastes and substances on the environment. Hazardous wastes and substances have their origin in the technological innovation of man and they become the problem of the society after the loss of utility and undue exposure in the case of hazardous chemicals. The problem of hazardous waste and substances arises from its management, handling, transboundary movement and disposal. Illicit trafficking, management and disposal of hazardous waste and substances have been implicated as the cause of array of terminal diseases ravaging man and the destruction of the plant and other living resources of the environment. The international community has evolved some legal safeguards while efforts have similarly been taken at continental, regional and national levels to ensure that the world environment is protected from the harmful effects of the harmful wastes and substances. This study considers the efficacy of the safeguards in the face of the spate of illicit trafficking of hazardous wastes and substances worldwide with a view of plucking any loophole and making the safeguards achieve the desired goals. The data for this study are obtained from Conventions, Protocols, Agreements, Codes and national laws as primary source while the secondary sources of information are textbooks, journal articles, newspapers and information from the internet. The study shows that apart from the lacuna in the legal framework, the power play between the developed and the developing countries and particularly the apathy of the industrialized countries towards the effort at overcoming the illegal transboundary movements of hazardous wastes and substances has remained the bane of the safeguards. The developing countries also, that are victims of dumping, are found to have compromised for pecuniary reasons. The study concludes that only a united voice can win the war against illegal trafficking of hazardous wastes. It is also recommended that a preventive rather than curative approach will be more effective in saving the world environment. KEYWORDS: Waste, Hazardous waste, Hazardous substances, Pollutants etc

This Article examines how the African Union’s adoption of the Malabo Protocol seeks to improve upon the limitations of the international legal framework for regulating hazardous waste. The Malabo Protocol criminalizes trafficking in hazardous waste and envisions a regional forum for such prosecutions, which presents an opportunity for African states to alter the status quo in environmental protection. This Article examines how the troubling history of toxic colonialism in Africa helped to inform the attempt to criminalize the trafficking of hazardous waste and create a forum under the Malabo Protocol for combating dirty dumping. This Article explores how the inadequate international legal framework for regulating hazardous waste led to the attempt to create a more robust regional regime under the Bamako Convention, with the Malabo Protocol serving as the vehicle for regional enforcement. It evaluates whether the Protocol furthers the punitive objectives of the Bamako regime to punish and deter trafficking in hazardous waste. It does this by analyzing whether the regional prosecution of dirty dumping is consistent with the newer theories of punishment, as well as some of the more traditional goals of punishment. This Article also analyzes the implications of the regional prosecution of dirty dumping under the Malabo Protocol. It assesses the potential challenges that might arise in the attempt to regionally prosecute trafficking in hazardous waste and suggests ways these issues can be resolved through creative interpretation of the Malabo Protocol. Lastly, this Article concludes that the Malabo Protocol’s provision for a regional forum for the prosecutions of traffickers of hazardous waste presents another venue for African states whose domestic judiciaries and related institutions may have limited resources. If implemented, the Protocol could facilitate closing the global impunity gap for dirty dumping in Africa.

There is virtually no house hold or individual in Nigeria that had not in one way or the other purchased, acquired, made use of or discarded one electrical/ electronic device or another in recent past. The developed economies, which incidentally produce these devices, now have increased regulation on them as a result of the concern on their environmental harm. The devices: used computers; cell phones and other mobile devices; house hold air conditioners; washing machines; refrigerators; etc, are often exported to developing countries that are ill prepared to tackle the technologies involved and do not possess relevant capacities to manage them in an environmentally sound manner. In some cases, obsolete and discarded electrical/electronic equipment are sent to some developing countries, including Nigeria, as charity. These " gifts " are received without a deep knowledge of their environmental implications compounded by their high obsolesces. Again, some of these developing economies have lax laws and are unable to contain or control the influx of such devices through the instrumentalities of the law. As the world enters into the technological age there is a growing awareness focused on the environmental and human impact of these electrical/electronic devices. However, the speed of this awareness is slow in most developing economies as a result of low scientific knowledge and technological development. What options are therefore available to these developing economies, like Nigeria, in the task of controlling the use of their countries as a dumping ground for obsolete and discarded electrical/electronic devices that now constitute e-waste? This had necessitated this paper and it sought to explore options for managing e-waste in Nigeria.

There is an urgent need to understand the inequitable concentration of hazardous waste in impoverished communities as a matter of environmental injustice that both reflects existing inequalities in power and wealth between the global North and the global South, and also reproduces them. Hence this chapter focuses on the broader conceptual or paradigm shift that has underpinned the development of the Basel Convention, which have the effect of undermining the principles of North-South environmental justice central to the Ban’s inception and advocacy. Our discussion of the changing international legal regulatory frameworks that govern the transboundary movement of hazardous waste from the mid- to late 1980s to the present illuminates how over the past three decades there has been a transformation in the underlying way in which North-South difference is understood and conceptualized within the hazardous waste regime. At stake in this paradigm shift is a transformation of how the North-South difference is conceptualized and a move away from the explicit environmental justice framework adopted by a coalition of countries from the global South, environmental social movements and environmental non-governmental organizations (NGOs) during the drafting of both the Basel Convention and the subsequent Ban Amendment.