Research and Markets (http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/e2b68d/the_aarhus_convent) has announced the addition of the "The Aarhus Convention at Ten. Interactions and Tensions between Conventional International Law and EU Environmental Law" report to their offering.
In 2008, it was exactly ten years ago that the 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 multilateral treaty, negotiated under the auspices of the UN Economic Commission for Europe, represents the most comprehensive and ambitious effort to establish international legal standards in the field of citizens' environmental rights to date. Though some of these standards were inspired by earlier EU environmental legislation, many provisions of the Aarhus Convention went beyond the rights already guaranteed by the EU and compelled the European Commission to propose new legislative acts, most of which were adopted between 2003 and 2006, to bring EU environmental law up to the Convention's standards.
Since it was signed a decade ago, the Aarhus Convention, which now has 41 Contracting Parties in Europe, Central Asia and the Caucasus region, has had a considerable impact on national systems of environmental law and administrative practices in many countries of Europe and beyond, as well as on the law and institutions of the European Union and even in other international organisations and fora.
The contributions assembled in this volume focus on various aspects of the relationship between the provisions of the Convention and the development of EU environmental law. They discuss the new legislative acts and amendments to existing legislation adopted by the EU institutions since 2003 in order to implement the Aarhus Convention.
These include Directive 2003/4/EC on public access to environmental information, Directive 2003/35/EC which provides 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, and Regulation 1367/2006, which organises the application of the procedural rights guaranteed by the Aarhus Convention at the level of EU institutions and bodies.
Other contributions address tensions that have arisen between normative developments within the framework of the Aarhus Convention and the internal legislation and policies of the EU. These concern contentious issues such as access to justice in environmental matters, where a Commission proposal for a Directive that would guarantee a minimum level of access to review procedures for environmental groups in the Member States remains stalled in the Council of the EU since 2004. Another area of tension discussed in this volume concerns public participation in regulatory decisions with respect to genetically modified organisms under Directive 2001/18/EC and Regulation 1829/2003.
A final group of contributions examine critical issues of implementation of the Aarhus Convention and related EU legislation in selected Member States. Together, the various contributions to this volume 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.
Michel Delnoy, Jonas Ebbesson, Ralph Hallo, Veerle Heyvaert, Jerzy Jendroka, Mihail Kritikos, Francesco La Camera, Richard Macrory, Daniela Obradovic, Marc Pallemaerts, Cesare Pitea, Gerhard Roller, Frankie Schram, Stephen Stec, Jeremy Wates and Ned Westaway have contributed to this volume.
For more information visit http://www.researchandmarkets.com/research/e2b68d/the_aarhus_convent
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