Pitea, Cesare --- "The Legal Status of NGOs in Environmental Non-compliance Procedures: An Assessment of Law and Practice" [2008] ELECD 150; in Dupuy, Pierre-Marie; Vierucci, Luisa (eds), "NGOs in International Law" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2008)

Book Title: NGOs in International Law

Editor(s): Dupuy, Pierre-Marie; Vierucci, Luisa

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781847205605

Section: Chapter 6

Section Title: The Legal Status of NGOs in Environmental Non-compliance Procedures: An Assessment of Law and Practice

Author(s): Pitea, Cesare

Number of pages: 23

Extract:

6. The legal status of NGOs in
environmental non-compliance
procedures: an assessment of law
and practice
Cesare Pitea

INTRODUCTION
In recent decades, rules of international law, especially treaty law, concerning
the environment have proliferated, but the compliance record with them is still
poor. In the framework of multilateral environmental agreements this problem
is increasingly addressed through the establishment of routine procedures of
control based on periodical self-reporting and review thereto and, in a dramat-
ically growing number of cases, of ad hoc procedures to address the circum-
stances and causes of a given case of non-compliance, often referred to as
non-compliance procedures (hereinafter NCPs).1 While one may find that the
large majority of such procedures are basically modelled on the one set up
under the Montreal Protocol,2 they vary considerably from one another. Any
attempt to reduce them to unity would lead to oversimplification, blurring,
rather than clarifying, their respective features.
Nonetheless, there are several features that are common to all the proce-
dures in question. Firstly, they are all designed to overcome the well known
difficulties inherent in the judicial or arbitral assessment of a breach of the law

1 On the distinction between routine and ad hoc procedures see T. Marauhn
(1996), `Towards a procedural law of compliance control in international environmen-
tal relations', Zeitschrift für ausländisches öffentliches Recht und Völkerrecht, 56(3),
696­731, at 698­9 and M. Ehrmann (2002), `Procedures of compliance control in inter-
national ...