Enacting and developing international environmental law - Introduction to International Environmental Law - page 64

Figure 3.1 The fourth meeting of the parties to the Espoo Convention took place in
Bucharest, Romania, 19-21 May 2008. At the meetings of the parties, the
member states met to make key decisions on the development of the treaty
regime. (Photo © UNECE)
The most ambitious environmental treaties can use expert panels. In the
climate regime, for instance, the greenhouse gas emission and sink inventories
by the Annex I states are fi rst certifi ed by the secretariat and then by the expert
panel. If the expert panel is dissatisfi ed with a state's inventory, it will forward
questions to the compliance committee.
Implementation committees have become the trademark of environmental
treaties, in the same way that monitoring committees are for human rights trea-
ties. The implementation committees of environmental treaties are different
from the monitoring committees of human rights treaties in one essential
point: the members of a human rights treaty monitoring body are indepen-
dent human rights experts, whereas the members of the environmental treaties
are representatives of states (the unique Aarhus Convention's compliance
committee members serve in their personal capacity, and nominations for
election can also be proposed by NGOs). The outcome is that the monitoring
bodies for human rights agreements are generally more outspoken in their
criticism of states. Both committee types share the same objective: to protect
the common good independent of states - human rights and the condition of
the environment.