KEYWORDS

Access to information; Climate change; Paris Agreement; Procedural rights

INTRODUCTION

In a conference on the importance of procedural environmental rights, aimed at collecting and comparing experience gained with the adoption and implementation of these rights under various legal instruments, our contribution explores how the Paris Agreement on Climate Change echoes Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration, as far as the ‘access to information’ pillar is concerned.

This is what Article 12 of the Paris Agreement stipulates, a provision that did not reach the headlines in Paris during COP21 in December 2015, and the formulation of which did not raise heated debates at that very moment. However, the explicit mention of the importance of public access to information with respect to enhancing actions in the Paris Agreement on Climate Change deserves notice and explanation for at least two reasons: firstly, due to the scope and status of the Paris Agreement; secondly, due to the specific nature of procedural rights. Scope and status. The 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change is a worldwide agreement, negotiated within the framework of the United Nations, and a legally binding treaty within the meaning of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties. By contrast, the 1998 Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, which decisively pushes the right for everyone to obtain access to environmental information held by public authorities, is only a regional treaty – it was negotiated within the framework of the UN Economic Commission for Europe –, even if its sphere of influence is actually much broader than the territory of its 47 Parties. As far as Principle 10 of the 1992 Rio Declaration is concerned, the Declaration only pertains to the category of ‘soft law’, a classification revealing its strong inspirational effect but lack of formal bindingness, even if this did not prevent it from gaining a major jurisprudential relevance.