SPECIAL REPORT (Amsterdam): On 25 June 2008, it will be exactly ten years ago that the UN Economic Commission for Europe’s Convention on Access to information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters was signed by representatives of 35 States and the European Community at a pan-European ministerial conference in the Danish city of Aarhus. This treaty, which became known as the Aarhus Convention, entered into force on 30 October 2001, and now has 41 Contracting Parties in Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus region. It represents the most comprehensive and ambitious effort to establish international legal standards in the field of environmental rights to date, and has had a considerable impact on national systems of environmental law and administrative practices in many countries of Europe and beyond, as well as at the level of the institutions of the European Union and even in other international organisations and fora.
To mark the 10th anniversary of the Aarhus Convention and reflect on its interaction with EU environmental law, the Centre for Environmental Law of the University of Amsterdam is organising an international conference in Amsterdam on 25 June 2008. The conference, entitled “The Aarhus Convention at Ten: Interactions and Tensions between Conventional International Law and EU Environmental Law”, will focus in particular on the relationship between the provisions of the Convention and the development of EU environmental law. It will address synergies and conflicts across the three ‘pillars’ of the Aarhus Convention and examine the broader legal and institutional implications of these interactions for the development of both EU law and international environmental law.
The conference speakers will include leading experts and practitioners from several European universities, governments and European institutions, civil society organisations and the Convention’s Secretariat and Compliance Committee. So far, confirmed speakers include: Jerzy Jendroska (Poland), Jonas Ebbesson (Sweden), Gerhard Roller (Germany), Veerle Heyvaert (UK), Ralph Hallo (Netherlands), Attila Tanzi (Italy), Marc Pallemaerts (Belgium) and Jeremy Wates (UN Economic Commission for Europe, Secretary to the Convention). Participation will be open to all.
Background
The aim of the Convention is to increase the openness and democratic legitimacy of public policies on environmental protection, and to develop a sense of responsibility among citizens by giving them the means to obtain information, to assert their interests by participating in the decision-making process, to monitor the decisions of public authorities and to take legal action to protect their environment. To this end, it guarantees a detailed set of procedural environmental rights to all members of the public.
In order to implement the Aarhus Convention, the EU has adopted a series of new legislative acts and revised several existing ones since 2003. Directive 2003/4/EC of 28 January 2003 on public access to environmental information replaced the earlier Directive 90/313/EEC and expanded citizens’ rights of access to environmental information held by public authorities in the Member States. Directive 2003/35/EC of 26 May 2003 provided for public participation in respect of the drawing up of certain plans and programmes relating to the environment in the Member States and strengthened the provisions on public participation in Directives 85/337/EEC on environmental impact assessment and 96/61/EC on integrated pollution prevention and control.
The 2003 Kiev Protocol to the Aarhus Convention on Pollutant Release and Transfer Registers led to the adoption by the European Parliament and Council, on 18 January 2006, of Regulation 166/2006/EC establishing the European Pollutant Release and Transfer Register, even before the entry into force of the Protocol itself. Finally, Regulation 1367/2006/EC, adopted on 6 September 2006, deals with the application of the procedural rights guaranteed by the Aarhus Convention at the level of EU institutions and bodies. It organizes a new public participation procedure which shall apply whenever these institutions and bodies prepare, modify or review plans and programmes likely to have significant effects on the environment, and provides for a special internal review procedure whereby NGOs meeting certain criteria can request the European Commission and other Community bodies to reconsider administrative acts they have adopted pursuant to EU environmental law, or to adopt such an act where they are legally required to do so but have failed to take action.
The decision to elaborate an international, legally binding instrument on citizens’ environmental rights within the framework of the UNECE, taken at a pan-European conference of environment ministers in Sofia in October 1995, was prompted by earlier developments in EC environmental law, such as the 1985 Directive on environmental impact assessment and the 1990 Directive on freedom of access to environmental information. Since it was signed in June 1998, the Aarhus Convention has clearly influenced the further development of EU environmental law and even contributed to the ongoing debate on the transparency and accountability of EU institutions, as well as to a number of wide-ranging reforms in European governance, such as the adoption of Regulation 1049/2001/EC regarding public access to European Parliament, Council and Commission documents.
However, the interaction between the Aarhus Convention and Community law has not always been unproblematic, and, more recently, tensions have arisen between normative developments within the framework of the Aarhus Convention and the internal legislation and policies of the EU.
For instance, a Commission proposal for a Directive on access to justice in environmental matters, aiming to harmonise national legislation on the subject in the Member States in the spirit of the Convention, remains stalled in the Council of the EU since 2004, despite the European Parliament’s support for such legislation. From 2001 to 2005, the European Commission and a group of Member States opposed proposals to amend the Aarhus Convention in order to provide for public participation in decision-making on the placing on the market and deliberate release into the environment of GMOs, on the grounds that these would interfere with existing EU legislation on the subject and conflict with the softer approach to public participation laid down in the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety. Nevertheless, an amendment to this effect, proposed by Moldova, was eventually adopted by the Meeting of the Parties to the Convention in May 2005. This amendment has so far been ratified by ten Parties to the Convention, including the EuropeanCommunity.
