Compliance: A Critical Task for COP7
October 25, 2001
At COP7, Parties must:
- Complete and adopt the compliance text
- Ensure that all delegations faithfully adhere to the commitments their
governments made in the Bonn Political Agreement - Retain and strengthen provisions for public participation and transparency
Last July 23 in Bonn, delegates, NGOs, and people throughout the world concerned about climate change breathed a sigh of relief when negotiators concluded around-the-clock discussions and resolved their differences over details of the Kyoto Protocol’s compliance system. By agreeing on the compliance “crunch issues,” Parties were able to finalize the Bonn Political Agreement, making ratification and implementation of the new climate treaty possible.
The Political Agreement establishes that the Protocol will have a “facilitative branch” to assist any Parties that need assistance or advice and an “enforcement branch” to determine if a developed-country (“Annex I”) Party has failed to comply with its legal obligations. If the enforcement branch makes a finding of non-compliance, it can order specific consequences, including (1) reducing the non-complying Party’s emissions allocation for the next commitment period, (2) preparation by the Party of a detailed plan explaining how it will meet that reduced allocation, and (3) prohibiting the Party from selling parts of its emissions allocation through the Protocol’s market-based “emissions trading” mechanisms.
The Political Agreement included a commitment that the second week of COP6 would “be devoted to the negotiation and adoption of a balanced package of further decisions incorporating and giving full effect” to all of the Agreement’s parts, including the compliance section. Nevertheless, a delegate from Australia, leading several other members of the “Umbrella Group” negotiating block, asserted in those sessions that key terms of the Agreement had no validity and had to be kept out of the draft text
for the compliance decision. Observers could not understand why these delegates refused to allow the compliance text to be finished, especially in light of their Ministers’ definitive support for the Political Agreement only a few days earlier. CIEL presumes that all delegates, having had the opportunity to receive instructions from their governments, will now work more cooperatively to “give full effect” to the Agreement’s terms and to complete the compliance text.
One area of the draft compliance text that Parties appeared to resolve long ago was the matter of transparency and public access to records and information during a compliance proceeding of the enforcement branch. Russia recently demanded that these provisions be voided. Because public awareness of the performance of countries in fulfilling their emissions obligations will be a critical factor in promoting compliance and convincing civil society that the Protocol and its institutions have legitimacy, these provisions must be retained in full.
All Parties at COP7 must re-commit themselves to negotiate in good faith the few remaining technical issues. Then, they must adopt the detailed text for the Protocol’s compliance system, as required by the Bonn Political Agreement. The precise means by which Parties will translate the mandatory nature of the non-compliance consequences into a final legal instrument has been left until a later time-perhaps until the first meeting of the Protocol’s “Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of theParties” (COP/MOP).
In the interests of transparency and accountability, CIEL will work to ensure that the performance of all delegations is reported to their publics back home. An effective compliance system will form the backbone of the Protocol and its market-based trading mechanisms. We urge all negotiators to complete this work now, so countries can begin to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and quickly bring it into force.