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Abstract"Protection of the environment" and "sustainability" are more significant than ever. The legal system contributes an important share to the protection of the environment. However, an overview of the German private environmental liability law shows that conventional tort law is not a suitable basis for civil liability for the environmental consequences of officially approved emissions of greenhouse gases. In general, one of the main problems of private environmental liability law lies in proving the individual causality of the conduct of an emitter, as the lawsuit of a Peruvian homeowner against a German energy company pending before the Higher Regional Court of Hamm illustratively demonstrates. The outcome of this lawsuit, which may have an outstanding significance for the status and development of private environmental liability law in Germany, is awaited with great anticipation. The article also briefly examines recent developments in private environmental liability law outside Germany and the question to what extent insurance can be an instrument to protect the environment.

Each legal system has individuals who are addressed with its rules and that the legal rules of the legal system are designed to regulate the relationship between these individuals, and one individual can have legal personality in more than one legal system.

The legal personality of these individuals is highlighted by the relationship between them and the legal system in which arranges for them rights and impose obligations on them.

The rights and duties of a legal person are not the same; they vary from person to person within the same legal system, and vary from one legal system to another.

With regard to the international legal order, it has its own international legal persons, foremost among them States.

As for the individual, his legal status under general international law is still not clearly defined and is a subject of controversy among the jurists and interpreters of international law. We will present the position of international jurisprudence on the status of the individual in the first demand, the rules of international law that address individuals directly in a second demand, and the right to submit complaints and claims at the international level in a third demand.

There are several reasons, pertaining to both the development of a generallyapplicable framework and the elaboration of issue-specific approaches, why it is timely to reflect on whether liability regimes are an appropriate tool for international environmental protection. At the level of general norms, the International Law Commission (ILC) appears to have arrived at a crossroads, as it must decide whether and how to approach further work on liability for transboundary environmental harm. At the same time, discussions about issuespecific liability regimes have proliferated. Indeed, it seems that few multilateral environmental agreements (MEAs) can be negotiated today without running across the liability issue in one way or another. The issue often divides Southern delegations, which tend to push for the inclusion of liability regimes, and Northerndelegations, which tend to resist. But the disagreement is not just a matter of policy and politics. There is also a lively debate in the literature about the pros and cons of international liability regimes. All the more reason, therefore, to assess whether engaging in the laborious task of developing a liability regime is a good investment of scarce negotiating resources. The goals that animate the quest for environmental liability are important ones: to make polluters pay for the environmental costs of their activities, to compensate innocent victims, to protect the environment, and, in certain contexts, to protect developing countries against environmental risks. The key question is whether, given these sensibilities, the approach makes sense.