The Aarhus Paradox: Time to Speak about Equal Opportunities in Environmental Governance

Last year the twenty years from the starting of the negotiations for the Aarhus Convention were accompanied with quite some attention from the academic community to the manner in which the Aarhus rights of access to information, public participation and effective judicial protection are implemented in the eu and its member states. Judicial protection and Article x of the Rio Convention were indeed the core topics of the iucn ael Colloquium, the eelf Conference, and the eelf Workshop with the European Commission about which we wrote in the previous jeepl number. Seminal judgments from the European Union (eu) courts confirm that the Aarhus Convention is not a paper tiger (Van Wolferen 2013). What, due to the absence of both the United States of America and Canada at the negotiation table, could have been considered a treaty confirming the status quo existing in the eu does have an impact on the legal orders of the eu and its member states (Jendroska, Aarhus Convention and Community Law: the Interplay, jeepl 2005). The Trianel, Altrip, Commission v Germany trilogy, discussed by Eliantonio & Grashof in the previous jeepl issue, is exemplary of the profound impact that the Aarhus Convention is having on the daily life of those living and operating in the eu and beyond. Not only judicial protection, but also access to information and public participation procedures at eu and national level have been amended to meet the Aarhus commitments. An overview of the compliance reports of the Aarhus