The Liability Convention has been characterized as "victim oriented." It was constructed to serve the needs of mankind. Space dangers may indeed be on the increase. More States and other users of the space environment are participating in space activities. Further, there is an ever enlarging and increasingly novel type of activity practiced or planned for man's newest exploitable environment. States are free, in general, to write their own laws for their own citizens. We are dealing here with the situation where international law requires a State to pay heed to the rights of foreign States and their nationals. The treaties dealing with liability for damages have created new dimensions of international tort law, i.e., the law that requires that unnecessary harms or wrongs not be imposed on juridical or natural persons, and if such were to eventuate that the wrongdoer be held accountable. International tort law, like the municipal variety, measures accountability in money damages. Applying the foregoing to the SPS and its component parts there are three questions to be asked. First, does international tort law impose any liability upon those who place a space object into a geostationary orbital position? To date no authoritative world institution has the power to allocate orbital slots to space objects. So long as the res communis principle is in effect it is not wrong, nor is it unlawful, for a space object to use an orbital position, despite claims made by eight equatorial States to the contrary. However, if there were a collision between such orbiting space objects, a fairly unlikely possibility, then This position has been accepted by Soviet writers. See, for example, B. G. Dudakov, "International Legal Problems on the Use of Geostationary 0rbit," Proceedings of the 19th Colloquium on the Law of Outer Space, pp. 407-409 (1977).
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