The 2016 Annual European Environmental Law Forum (EELF) Conference will be held in Wroclaw (Poland). The Conference will be dedicated to Procedural Environmental Rights of the public. The importance of procedural rights is currently widely recognised. They serve not only as a guarantee of the right to environment and a tool to increase participatory democracy and active involvement of the public in environmental protection but also as an effective instrument of monitoring compliance with- and enforcement of- environmental law. Following recognition of their importance, procedural environmental rights have increasingly been acknowledged in legal frameworks at the national, supranational and international level. The first comprehensive approach to procedural environmental rights at the international level was undertaken when access to information, public participation in decision making and access to justice in environmental matters were codified as non-binding principles in Principle X of the Rio Declaration. The binding international standard in relation to procedural environmental rights was set with the adoption in 1998 in the Danish city of Aarhus of the UNECE Convention on access to information, public participation in decision making and access to justice in environmental matters (Aarhus Convention). The Conference aims to collect and compare the experience gained with the adoption and implementation of the procedural environmental rights under these various legal instruments.The organizers are hereby inviting submission of abstracts for presentations at the Conference. Presentations shall focus on the conference theme and address one of the following thematic clusters and subthemes.
