Highlights for Friday, 2 June 2006

The second High-Level Meeting on Envisioning the Next Steps for Compliance with and Enforcement of Multilateral Environmental Agreements (MEAs) held its final substantive session on Friday morning, 2 June 2006.

Participants provided their comments on a draft Chairman’s summary of the meeting, which was circulated on Friday morning. Philippe Roch, Chairman of the meeting and former Secretary of State and Director of the Swiss Agency for the Environment, Forests, and Landscape, outlined that the draft would be revised based on inputs received and made available to participants prior to their departure from the meeting on Friday afternoon. The Chairman clarified that participants would have the chance to review this draft and offer further comments prior to posting it on the UNEP website.

Bakary Kante, Director, Division of Environmental Conventions (DEC), UNEP, said that the Chairman’s Summaries of the first and second High-Level Meetings constituted the outcome of this informal brainstorming process (referred to as the “Colombo Process”), engaging representatives of several key MEA Convention Secretariats, and national and international environmental experts. He said that UNEP would use the text as a starting point for the elaboration of an action plan, which he anticipated would be presented to the UNEP Governing Council in 2007.

The draft Chair’s summary, as distributed on Friday afternoon, 2 June, captures several areas in which progress could be made to address key challenges to effective implementation, compliance with and enforcement of MEAs and elaborates possible options for concrete action involving all stakeholders in order to improve the overall implementation of, compliance with and enforcement of MEAs.

Before closing the meeting, Bakary Kante formally launched the UNEP Manual on Compliance with and Enforcement of MEAs, a manual intended to be used by a wide audience: treaty negotiators, political officials, lawyers, police, customs officers, researchers, and legal drafters in governmental, non-governmental, academic, and professional institutions. He then invited participants to join in the UNEP festivities to commemorate World Environment Day and the reception hosted by the Swiss Federal Council, the State Council of the Republic and Canton of Geneva and the Executive Council of the City of Geneva.