Aarhus Convention

Campaign on Public Participation – NGOs Input

23.02.2007 |Anke Stock

On behalf of Eco-Forum we are co-ordinating the NGOs' response to the consultation process that was conducted by the parties to the Aarhus Convention on the Almaty Guidelines. The aim of the consultation is to obtain views of other international forums on the Almaty Guidelines and also to learn from their experiences in the area of access to information, public participation in decision-making and access to justice in environmental matters. Responses received by international forums are available on the UN/ECE website.

The Aarhus Secretariat will hold an international workshop June 20-21, 2007 in Geneva with a number of interested international forums and their stakeholders in order to provide a platform to meet and exchange experiences of practises with respect to the themes of access to information, public participation in decision-making and access to justice.

In preparation of the workshop Eco-Forum wants to compile a number of responses of NGOs that have experiences with the forums that have taken part in the consultation process. We want to prepare a publication that we can submit at the workshop. The publication will provide a good overview of the perspectives of various NGOs on the attitude and the practises of the forums regarding access to information, public participation in decision-making and access to justice. We would be very grateful for your input.

Your input can either consist of a short report in relation to your experience with one or several international forum(s) on the list or of a shadow report to the response(s) of a (or several) specific forum(s) or of a reply to the questionnaire that was used for the consultation process by the Secretariat.
Please be so kind as to indicate until 9 March 2007 whether you will be able to provide us with any input. The final deadline for submissions will be 16 April 2007. Please send all information, replies or queries to Anke Stock - anke.stock@wecf.org.