A treaty dedicated to environmental openness
The Aarhus Convention, formally the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, was adopted in the Danish city of Aarhus in 1998 and entered into force in 2001. Negotiated under the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), it rests on three pillars: access to environmental information, public participation in environmental decisions, and access to justice when either of the first two rights is denied. The first pillar creates a distinct access regime that runs parallel to general freedom of information laws and is, in several respects, stronger than most of them.
How the EU implemented it
For the EU member states, the information pillar was implemented by Directive 2003/4/EC on public access to environmental information, which replaced an earlier directive from 1990. Every member state has had to transpose its standards into national law, so an environmental request in any EU country is measured against the directive as well as against domestic rules. The EU institutions are bound separately, through a dedicated Aarhus regulation adopted in 2006 that applies the convention's standards to bodies such as the Commission; for their ordinary documents the general EU access regime applies, described in the guide on how to use European freedom of information rules. The convention's membership also reaches beyond the Union, taking in much of the wider UNECE region, including non-EU states such as Switzerland and Norway.
A wider circle of public authorities
General access laws typically bind government departments and administrative agencies. The environmental regime deliberately casts a wider net. It covers not only administrations but also natural or legal persons performing public administrative functions relating to the environment, and those providing public services relating to the environment under the control of a public body. In practice this can pull water companies, energy utilities and waste operators into the access regime even where they have been privatised, so a body that is entirely outside a country's general freedom of information law may still have to answer environmental requests.
A broad notion of environmental information
The definition of environmental information is drawn generously. It covers the state of the elements of the environment, such as air, water, soil, land, landscape and biological diversity; factors affecting them, including substances, energy, noise, radiation, waste and emissions; measures and activities that affect or protect those elements, from policies and legislation to plans and agreements; reports on implementation; the economic analyses and assumptions used in environmental decision-making; and the state of human health and safety insofar as it is affected. A contract or a cost-benefit analysis can therefore be environmental information when it is tied to a measure with environmental effects.
Narrower grounds for refusal
The permissible refusal grounds are exhaustive and must be interpreted restrictively. Each refusal requires the authority to weigh the public interest served by disclosure against the interest served by withholding, case by case. The most distinctive feature is the emissions rule: certain exceptions, including commercial confidentiality, cannot be invoked to withhold information on emissions into the environment. General access laws rarely contain anything equivalent, which is one reason experienced requesters choose the environmental route whenever the subject matter allows it.
Deadlines and oversight
No interest has to be stated. Information must be supplied as soon as possible and at the latest within one month, extendable to two for voluminous or complex requests, and a refusal must be given in writing with reasons and a pointer to review procedures. Compliance with the convention itself is watched by a dedicated committee that may receive communications directly from members of the public alleging that a party has fallen short, an arrangement that remains unusual in international law. Its findings are not court judgments, but they carry considerable weight in how parties adjust their law and practice.