Liability is a protective measure for the potential victim.
Protection of their citizens is one of the cord tasks of governments. To ensure mechanisms of compensation and redress for the victims is a prerequisite of justice. So, biosafety is also a matter of equity as befitting a protocol under the Convention on Biological Diversity. Compensation and redress address the time after the damage has been done. They are ex post measures which, however, cannot solve the problem of time-lags between different impacts of a given technology.