Page 25 EU ages greater awareness of issues affecting the environment and increases public participation in decision-making. Educating the population stimulates citizen activism to pressure industry, enabling a more sophisticated analysis of environmental impacts of products and services to ensure climate-friendlier manufacturing practices. Institutions and world-leading conferences have shown the urgency of access to accurate information in the EU and in the wider world. In 1998 the Aarhus Convention was signed, ensuring access to information, public participation in decision-making, and access to justice in environmental matters. The Convention is one of the most important international environmental agreements to which the EU is a party, encouraging compliance through non-judicial means and providing for a compulsory state-to-state dispute settlement mechanism. It guarantees everyone the right to receive environmental information held by public authorities, including information on the state of the environment, human health and safety, policies or measures, the right to participate in environmental decision-making, and the right to challenge public decisions that are non-compliant with environmental law. One of the key mechanisms that facilitates compliance with the Convention is the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee (ACCC), a non-judicial consultative body that is empowered to review the conformity of members with the Convention, amongst other things, based on communications with the public. The Committee issues its recommendations to the Meeting of the Parties, which is responsible for determining appropriate measures to ensure such compliance with the Convention by the party concerned. Thus, the ACCC gives both citizens and environmental organizations an independent and external means of addressing compliance with the Convention. As part of the Aarhus Convention and its incorporation under EU law, the European Union sets an important example of providing access to information that strengthens the access to justice in environmental matters. Disturbingly, despite the comprehensive and effective regulations of international law already in place, this crucial public access to environmental information is not always guaranteed. This was exposed by the recent legal action taken by two NGOs: Right to Know Clg and Public.Resources.org. The Irish NGO Right to Know Clg defends the rights of citizens to access information, to strengthen democracy and transparency, while the US-based not-forprofit public charity Public.Resources. org was established to make government information more broadly available. Together, both NGOs requested to view public safety standards, including the safety of toys, such as the composition of children’s chemical sets and the chemicals present in products such as finger paint. These kinds of standards are agreed upon by a private body called the European Committee for Standardisation (CEN), which then sells the agreed standards for profit. Regarding the NGO’s complaints, the European Commission refused to give the requested information, disclosing that the standards could be purchased from the CEN and that, due to copyright issues, they were not available for gratuitous publication. Of course, this refusal is incredibly problematic: following the European Court of Justice in James Elliott Construction (C-613/14), harmonized standards, such as those requested by the two NGOs, or references to such standards, form part of EU law. Thus, in the commencing proceedings, the NGOs will argue that no copyright protection of these requested harmonized standards is possible because they are part of EU law. The standards lack originality and therefore do not benefit from copyright protection; and the EU commission did not actually demonstrate the alleged undermining of the commercial interest of the standardization organization. More importantly, however, as the NGOs put forward, the concepts of the rule of
The access to information and legislation is one of the most basic principles of our democratic society, an inherent part of the rule of law, which the EU commission is flatly denying in the case at hand. Access to information is a widely-regarded international human rights norm.
