Environmental state and information politics - Environmental Reform in the Information Age - page 135

of the information provided; thus, information is not aggregated by
industrial sector, geographical area or water body. Information is now
increasingly specific on facilities, companies and products.
The first major mandatory environmental information disclosure
program started in the late 1980s in the United States, the U.S. Toxic
Release Inventory, TRI. During the 1990s, the U.S. Environmental Pro-
tection Agency (USEPA) substantially expanded the amount of chem-
icals for reporting and the number of firms that had to disclose their
emission data. In the 1990s, there was a growing demand for and regu-
latory codification of right-to-know and information disclosure in the
environmental policies of almost all Western industrialised countries.
It is surprising to see that most of the national freedom of information
acts have an environmental origin or background, and environmen-
talists can be found among the constituencies that have been pressing
continuously for freedom of information.
The call for further public access to environmental information col-
lected by polluters and state agencies got a new - now international -
impulse following Principle 10 of the Rio declaration, agreed on at
the United National Conference on Environment and Development
(UNCED) in 1992. Within the European continent, this resulted in the
Århus Convention in 1997, 2 whereas globally the Access Initiative and
the Partnership for Principle 10 continuously kept access to and disclo-
sure of information on the global political agenda. By 2000, forty-four
countries had passed access-to-information legislation; twenty-four of
them were OECD countries (World Bank, 2002 ). 3 Also, international
organisations and institutions such as the World Trade Organisation
and the World Bank were faced with increasing pressure - internally

2

The Convention on Access to Information, Participation in Decision-Making
and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, was developed under auspices
of the UN Economic Commission for Europe, was adopted in June 1998 and
entered into force on October 30, 2001. In 2004, more than forty countries had
signed the Convention and thirty-three had ratified the Convention, which also
has provisions for non-ECE countries to accede. The Convention refers
specifically to the active use of the Internet and electronic information disclosure
in providing access to environmental information. For the EU, this Convention
resulted in the revision of the EU directive 90/313 on access to environmental
information into the much more powerful EU directive 2003/4/EC.

3

In some countries, access to information even made it into their constitutions,
for instance, in Thailand, Mexico, South Africa and Uganda (although the latter
had not specified this constitutional right in a Freedom of Information Act as of
2002).