The Aarhus Convention and Innovations in Compliance with Multilateral Environmental Agreements

The Aarhus Convention is the first multinational environmental agreement that focuses exclusively on obligations of nations to their citizens and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). The Aarhus Convention's compliance mechanism includes several significant features including: (1) the ability of nongovernmental organizations to nominate experts for possible election to the Compliance Committee; (2) the requirement that all Committee members be independent experts rather than representatives of state Parties to the Convention; and (3) the right of any member of the public and any NGO to file a communication with the Committee alleging a Party's noncompliance. In just two years of considering cases, the Aarhus compliance mechanism has already dealt with several significant issues in each of the three areas that the Aarhus Convention covers: access to information, public participation, and access to justice. The Compliance Committee and Meeting of the Parties have ruled that governments may not insist that people asking for environmental information provide their reason for seeking that information, and also that governments must provide clear guidance to public authorities on providing information to the public. Regarding public participation, the decisions spell out duties of providing adequate public notice, adequate procedures for written or oral comments, and careful consideration of comments that the public or NGOs may make. Complaints about lack of access to justice have also been resolved in decisions where Parties have been found in noncompliance with the Aarhus Convention because of failure to provide legal standing to NGOs and because of slow judicial review procedures. The article offers some observations about the tools used by the Committee in its first cases, the characteristics of NGOs that have filed communications with the Committee, the attitudes of governments toward the compliance process, and possible reasons why most of the cases brought to the Committee so far have been from Central and Eastern Europe, Caucasus, and Central Asia. The independence, transparency, and NGO involvement in the Convention's novel compliance mechanism represent an ambitious effort to bring democracy and participation to the very heart of compliance itself. Whether this will be successful and whether it will be emulated in the compliance mechanisms of other conventions will depend on the work of the Committee itself, the actions of Meetings of the Parties, and the amount of vigilance shown by citizens in demanding compliance with the Aarhus Convention