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In December, CEE countries will join the push for a more robust means of ensuring the people's right to know about threats from toxins and pollution By Marianna Bolshakova More than 2,000 people were killed, and many others seriously injured, in a December 1984 accidental methyl cyanide release at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal, India, where residents did not know such deadly substances were being handled in their community. Only a few months later, a similar accident occurred at the Union Carbide facility in West Virginia, U.S., this time injuring more than 100 people. In response, the U.S. Congress in 1986 passed the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-know Act (EPCRA), to provide the public with information on the manufacture, use, storage or handling of hazardous substances in their community. The effectiveness of this law in controlling, and actually reducing, the use and release of pollution and toxins has led to ambitious efforts to reproduce similar regulations on an international scale. Negotiations to determine how vigorous this protection will be will continue in the first week of December. While some Central and Eastern European countries are ready for more robust regulation of pollution and toxic wastes, many European Union negotiators favour a more watered-down approach. In the U.S., the 1986 legislation led to the development of a Toxic Release Inventory (TRI), which is now an Internet-accessible, GIS-based, regularly updated inventory, providing information on the release and transfer of over 600 substances by various facilities. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has discovered that, by forcing facilities to reveal details of their operations, the existence of TRI has actually led to reductions in pollution and in the use of hazardous substances. Other countries have been eager to copy the success of the TRI, and, since the mid-1990s, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has been mandated to coordinate work on promoting development of similar "pollutant release and transfer registers" (PRTRs) on the national level in OECD member states. It is not surprising, therefore, that, when the "Aarhus" Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters was being drafted in 1996-1998, the need to address the issue of PRTR emerged. The so-called Aarhus Convention, launched in June 1998 and currently signed by 40 parties and ratified by 17, is meant to ensure that the public has ready access to information that may have an impact on their environment. Although it provides an excellent legal environment for facilitating development of PRTRs in Europe and elsewhere, this development is still in its early phases. Because the countries that drafted the Aarhus Convention were concerned about the time and resources required to develop a full-fledged PRTR, Article 5.9 of the Aarhus Convention, which covers PRTRs, was left very flexible. In meetings over the past few years, the signatories to the convention have agreed to create an open-ended inter-governmental Working Group - a negotiating forum intended to prepare a legally binding instrument on PRTR for adoption at the fifth "Environment for Europe" Ministerial Conference, set for 2003 in Kiev. The Working Group has already recommended that the legally binding PRTR instrument be drafted in the form of a Protocol to the Convention, and be open to both parties and non-parties to the convention. At their next meeting, in the Palais des Nations, in Geneva, in the first week of December, the Working Group is set to start hammering out the details of how the PRTR instrument should work. Most of the negotiating parties favour a step-by step approach, where certain more controversial or more complicated elements of the PRTR system will be phased in during the later stages. It is still unclear which of the elements will be postponed to later stages, and what, if any, deadlines should be set. Many negotiators from European Union countries favour a somewhat extended form of the European Pollution Emission Register (EPER). The EPER is an EU-wide regional database of toxic substances and pollution emissions, based on member-states' submissions. Although relevant as a sub-regional register, the EPER is not an integrated and full PRTR, based on the principles developed by OECD. Some other countries Ð including the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland and Yugoslavia, from this region, and Canada, Norway and the United States - have extensive experience in running national registers. Their negotiators, along with members of NGOs and international organisations, favour development of a full-fledged PRTR. They argue that only a more thorough system can fulfill the main purpose of the registers under the Aarhus Convention: to provide fast, easy public access to meaningful information on potential chemical hazards. The EPER is currently weaker than a full PRTR because: the EPER only requires reporting every three years instead of annually; the EPER does not include reporting on waste or its transfer, and thus does not cover releases into the soil; and the EPER covers fewer hazardous substances, only 50 right now. There has already been clear indication from the European Commission that the EPER will be improved within a few years of its start-up in 2003. With the Aarhus PRTR Protocol likely to come into force in, or after, the year 2007, it might not be the most efficient approach to limit its content to some of the current EPER features. Whether strong means for controlling hazardous substances will be developed from the Aarhus Convention may be determined in Geneva in December. Marianna Bolshakova, a project manager at the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe, specialises in access to environmental information, public participation and access to justice. |
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