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First Meeting of the Committee to Support Implementation and Compliance of the Escazú Agreement Will Take Place at ECLAC

Sustainable development and human settlements
4 August 2023|Announcement

This meeting – at which the committee members elected during the regional treaty’s COP 2 will formally assume their functions – will be held in Santiago, Chile on August 10.

The First Meeting 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 – better known as the Escazú Agreement – will be held in person next Thursday, August 10 at ECLAC’s headquarters in Santiago, Chile.

The meeting’s main objective is for the committee’s inaugural members to formally assume their functions, in accordance with Decision II/1 of the Second Meeting of the Conference of the Parties (COP 2), which took place last April in Argentina.

At that time, participants elected the first seven members of the Committee, which is a subsidiary body of the Conference of the Parties that is focused on promoting implementation of the Agreement and supporting the Parties in that regard. These members are: Guillermo Eduardo Acuña (from Chile); Mariana Blengio Valdés (Uruguay); Rita Leonette Joseph-Olivetti (Grenada); Patricia Madrigal Cordero (Costa Rica); Andrés María Napoli (Argentina); Carole Denise Angela Stephens (Jamaica); and Félix Wing Solís (Panama).

The First Meeting of the Committee to Support Implementation and Compliance of the Escazú Agreement will be inaugurated at 11 a.m. local time in Chile (GMT -4) on August 10 by Marcelo Cousillas, Director of the Legal Advisory Department of the Environment Ministry of Uruguay, in its capacity as Chair of the Presiding Officers of the Escazú Agreement; María Cecilia Nicolini, Secretary of Climate Change, Sustainable Development and Innovation at the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development of Argentina, which served as Chair of the Escazú Agreement’s COP 2; Irene Murillo, the Agreement’s elected representative of the public; and José Manuel Salazar-Xirinachs, 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 Implementation and Compliance of the agreement will be elected, and Maisa Rojas, Chile’s Environment Minister, will deliver remarks.

Thus far, the Escazú Agreement has been signed by 24 countries of Latin America and the Caribbean and features 15 States Parties: Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Belize, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, Grenada, Guyana, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint 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 central headquarters 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 (a one-step procedure that necessitates no signature). The instruments of accession have the same legal requirements and effects as ratification.

Journalists are invited to participate in this in-person meeting at ECLAC’s headquarters in Santiago, Chile, obtaining accreditation in advance via email at prensa@cepal.org.

Live transmission of the event will also be available on ECLAC’s official website www.cepal.org, at https://live.cepal.org/escazu and on its institutional accounts on Twitter (https://twitter.com/cepal_onu) and Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/cepal.onu).

What: First Meeting of the Committee to Support Implementation and Compliance of the Escazú Agreement.

When: Thursday, August 10, 2023 (11 a.m. to 1 p.m. local time in Chile, GMT -4).

Where: ECLAC’s central headquarters in Santiago, Chile (Av. Dag Hammarskjöld 3477, Vitacura, Celso Furtado conference room).

Virtual connection via numerous platforms:

For queries related to journalistic coverage of this event, contact ECLAC’s Public Information Unit in Santiago, Chile. Email: prensa@cepal.org; Telephone: +562 2210 2040.

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