International Disaster Response Law. Surveying the law

International Disaster Response Law has developed significantly in the last decades, as clearly proven by the increasing number of relevant treaties which have been signed and ratified worldwide. The codification of various aspects related to disaster prevention, management, and post-disaster recovery did happen in a pretty short time, very often just as a reaction to new typologies of disasters, sometimes in a confused and unco-ordinated manner, very often causing significant overlapping and contradictions. A closer investigation of the various legal texts makes evident that there are significant differences in the terminology used, discrepancies and inconsistencies between the various treaties and among the various treaty levels (bilateral, regional, universal), different stages of development of the rules regulating international co-operation in disaster prevention and management (very sophisticated and comprehensive rules in Latin America, less detailed legal regulation in the African continent), ongoing confusion and uncertainty about the borders between soft law and positive law (in disaster prevention and management soft law has a proven record of great influence and importance in orienting the behavior of international actors). The need for a better synchronization and co-ordination of the codification activities is inevitably and dramatically emerging. The author focuses the attention on how current international instruments are directly or indirectly addressing disaster prevention, management, and recovery response. He describes what the legal picture looks like at universal and at regional level and finally addresses existing problems in terms of coordination of legal instruments adopted at various levels (bilateral, regional, and universal).