Konferenzbeitrag
Stockholm, Rio, Århus, Inspire: Public Access to Environmental Information in the EU
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Datum
2007
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Shaker Verlag
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With its 2007 report on Climate Change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC states the anthropogenic influence on Climate Change to be at about 90%. This marks an increase of 24% compared to the last report of the year 2001. These new findings have been in a large part possible on account of a uch improved data basis!
While the scientific community has long been aware of the importance of access to data to issue qualified assessments of a.o. environmental phenomena, it becomes more and more apparent that sustainable development and governance requires information, consultation and participation of the public. It is evident that this can only work on the basis that the public should not be excluded from having access to environmental data and information.
In this regard, the adoption of the directive aimed at establishing an infrastructure for spatial information in the Community (aka INSPIRE) by the European Council in November 2006 marks a major stepping stone towards this goal.
With the INSPIRE directive to come into effect in 2007 the implementation of the Århus Convention is seeing its most recent activity of casting the paradigm of free access to environmental information into European legislation.
The Århus Convention (Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decisionmaking and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters) has its roots in the 1972 Declaration of United Nations on the Human Environment (Stockholm Declaration …), stating in Principle 20 that the free flow of up-to-date scientific information and transfer of experience must be supported and assisted, to facilitate the solution of environmental problems; environmental technologies should be made available to developing countries on terms which would encourage their wide dissemination without constituting an economic burden on the developing countries.
Although it took exactly another 20 years, Principle 10 of the 1992 Rio Declaration of the UN on Environment and Development laid out the foundation for the Århus Convention on Access … It states that Environmental issues are best handled with participation of all concerned citizens, at the relevant level. At the national level, each individual shall have appropriate access to information concerning the environment that is held by public authorities, including information on hazardous materials and activities in their communities, and the opportunity to participate in decision-making processes. States shall facilitate and encourage public awareness and participation by making information widely available. Effective access to judicial and administrative proceedings, including redress and remedy, shall be provided.
With it’s 3 pillars: Public access to environmental Information, public participation in environmental decision making and access to justice in environmental matters the Århus Convention establishes a number of rights of the public (individuals and their associations) with regard to the environment.
The Directive on public access to environmental information (2003/4/EC…) represents the legal implementation of first pillar of the Århus Convention. It requires Member States to progressively make available the environmental information held by public administration bodies and disseminate it to the public. The Directive had to be implemented in national legislation by the first quarter of 2005. While the legal implementation poses little problems, the technical part is more challenging. However, in contrast to INSPIRE, neither guiding material is available as of yet, nor is there a harmonised and integrated implementing approach visible throughout the EU. The process of setting the INSPIRE legislation has been accompanied by an intensive process of agreeing on implementation rules and standards. No less than four drafting teams have been busy for several years with this task, with the result that now that legislation has been passed the Member States are basically set for the technical implementation of the directive.
Regarding the much broader thematic scope of directive 2003/4/EC (in fact the thematic space of INSPIRE is a full subset of directive 2003/4/EC) it is surprising that no such support is available here. The same holds also true for the environmental information directive’s “sister” directive, the “public participation” directive 2003/35/EC. The latter is the legal implementation of the second and third pillars of the Århus Convention, acknowledging that effective public participation in the taking of decisions enables the public to express, and the decision-maker to take account of opinions and concerns which may be relevant to those decisions, thereby increasing the accountability and transparency of the decisionmaking process and contributing to public awareness of environmental issues and support for the decisions taken.
The objective of Directive 2003/4/EC is to contribute to:
(a) providing for public participation in respect of the drawing up of certain plans and programmes relating to the environment;
(b) improving the public participation and providing for provisions on access to justice within Council Directives 85/337/EEC and 96/61/EC. Now, in order to further the implementation of directive 2003/4/EC, a harmonised strategy, the development and distribution of guidance material and tools are dearly required. Taking account of the X-Domain and X-Level character of the environmental information sector, as for INSPIRE, interoperability and integration are the key aspects for implementation. It is thus mandatory that information dissemination follows a structured approach on the basis of international standards. Furthermore, tools and services are needed to facilitate access to information. This paper will draw up the thematic space and correlations of the environmental information directive. It will address the requirements and challenges of implementing the Public Access to Environmental Information Directive 2003/4/EC. It will furthermore give an overview on the state of the art of its implementation in member states, highlighting current legal and technical issues. Eventually a procedure for developing a harmonized approach on the technical implementation will be discussed.