SANTIAGO, Chile, CMC – Two Caribbean Community (CARICOM) nationals are among the members of the Committee to Support Implementation and Compliance of the Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean (Escazu Agreement) meeting here on Thursday.
An official statement said that the main objective of the meeting is for the Committee’s inaugural members to formally assume their functions by the decision of the Second Meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 2), which took place last April in Argentina.
At that time, Jamaican Carole Denise Angela Stephens and Grenadian Rita Leonette Joseph-Olivetti were among the first seven members to be elected to the Committee, which is a subsidiary body of the Conference of the Parties that is focused on promoting the implementation of the Agreement and supporting the Parties in that regard.
The other members are from Chile, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Panama.
Director of the Legal Advisory Department of the Environment Ministry of Uruguay, Marcelo Cousillas, in his capacity as Chair of the Presiding Officers of the Escazú Agreement, will inaugurate the first meeting of the Committee.
It will also be attended by José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, the Executive Secretary of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), the United Nations regional organization that acts as the treaty’s Secretariat.
After that, the Chair and Vice-Chairs of the Committee to Support the Implementation and Compliance of the Agreement will be elected.
So far, the Escazú Agreement has been signed by 24 countries in Latin America and the Caribbean and features 15 States Parties.
They are Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Grenada, Guyana, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Uruguay.
The Agreement was adopted in Escazú, Costa Rica, on March 4, 2018, and entered into force on April 22, 2021.
The 24 countries that have signed it can proceed to deposit their instruments of ratification at any time at the United Nations in New York. The countries that did not sign it within the first stipulated time frame, between September 27, 2018, and September 26, 2020, can become Parties through accession.
ECLAC said the instruments of accession have the exact legal requirements and effects as ratification.
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