Enacting and developing international environmental law - Introduction to International Environmental Law - page 63

The fi rst task is to ensure that regular reporting on implementation to the
meeting of the parties or the implementation committee must be a legal obliga-
tion. The duty to report has sometimes been omitted from a treaty and so the
parties have not considered it a legal obligation. An example of this is the Espoo
Convention.
The Espoo Convention on Environmental Impact Assessment in a Transbound-
ary Context was adopted in 1991. There was no agreement on e.g. the duty
to report. The second amendment in 2004 attempted to rectify the matter by
making reporting compulsory. However, since an insuffi cient number of states
have ratifi ed the second amendment, it has still not entered into force. The
meeting of the parties of the Espoo Convention resolved this problem with the
establishment of an implementation committee which made a synthesis report on
its most important decisions.
The implementation committee came up with an interesting solution relat-
ing to the duty to report: it stated that although the second amendment has not
entered into force, the states are obliged to issue reports; otherwise, they can be
taken to the implementation committee for non-observance. The implementation
committee refers here to the fact that the second amendment was clearly accepted
in the meeting of the parties, and the obligation to report should therefore be
considered comparable to a legal obligation.
It is essential to ensure that states are legally obliged to report. How can we
ensure that the regular reports that the states write about themselves remain
objective, however?
Human rights treaties have solved this by establishing a separate monitoring
committee of independent human rights experts to which the country reports
are submitted. At the same time that a state submits its own report, the commit-
tee also receives reports from other sources, including human rights NGOs.
This gives the committee the opportunity to ask diffi cult questions when the
representatives of the states explain how they are complying with the human
rights treaty in question.
A similar idea is being implemented in environmental treaties, although it
is less well developed. The state reports go to either the meeting of the parties,
the treaty secretariat, or directly to the implementation committee. They are
generally inspected by representatives of states - not independent experts in
international environmental law. Some environmental treaty regimes have
started to receive information from NGOs but to a much lesser degree than
the human rights bodies. States usually report on their own implementation
of the treaty obligations. This, of course, is not the most desirable develop-
ment as many countries are tempted to issue good reports even in problem
situations.