Sustainable Tourism Law

THE BINDING FORCE OF LEGISLATIVE INSTRUMENTS 181 whom it is addressed (e.g. an EU country or an individual company) and is directly applicable 15 . c) And at the internal level of the States, Sustainable Tourism should be regulated by binding internal laws. The World Travel Organization is working with this goal. Therefore, the Sustainable Tourism Programme promotes the transformation of the tourism sector. The first work area is the promotion of the integration of principles into tourism policies and legal frameworks, fostering the implementation of these policies and monitoring progress. The Draft UNWTO Convention for the Protection of Tourists and the Rights and Obligations of Service Providers (2017) is a good example of how to strengthen the binding force of the normative instruments in the matter of Sustainable Tourism, because it invites the Member States to implement the Convention into national law and practices: Article 6 Standards States Parties shall take all necessary measures, in accordance with their national laws and practices, in order to implement the requirements in the standards of this Convention. CONCLUSIONS The goals and areas regarding Sustainable Tourism have been developed since the 1980s and have been reflected in several legal instruments, with most of them being part of the Soft Law legislative technique. There are some reasons that justify the application of the technique of Soft Law in the field of Sustainable Tourism: the lack of a global and centralized legislative authority with legislative powers for the creation of binding general legal rules; the lack of centralized European policies on tourism; and because Sustainable Tourism needs to be regulated with flexible techniques that provide global answers to the demands of society. 15 See: www.europa.eu .