April 2008
CIEL attorney Glenn Wiser assisted UNEP Chemicals by serving on the secretariat for the Global Mercury Partnership meeting, which took place in Geneva, Switzerland, 1-3 April 2008. The Partnership meeting culminated a consultative process between UNEP and governments and other stakeholders to strengthen the mercury partnerships by developing an overarching framework for them. Participants successfully completed the final draft of the overarching framework document on the last day of the meeting. CIEL believes that the strengthened Global Mercury Partnership can help reduce anthropogenic mercury emissions in the short and medium terms, and in the longer term can complement and contribute to effective implementation of an enhanced approach to global mercury control that the Governing Council may initiate at its next session in February 2009.
The finished overarching framework establishes the overall goal of the UNEP Global Mercury Partnership: “to protect human health and the global environment from the release of mercury and its compounds by minimizing and, where feasible, ultimately eliminating global, anthropogenic mercury releases to air, water and land.” The framework creates an organizational structure for the Global Partnership, detailed operational guidelines, and a recommended template for the business plans that each of the individual partnership areas will develop. The framework also contains brief sections on information exchange, financial resources, and evaluation.
The operational guidelines create a new “Partnership Advisory Group,” which will have up to twenty-five members comprised of representatives of governments, regional economic integration organizations, and major groups and sectors (including NGOs, science, and industry). The Partnership Advisory Group will, among other things, encourage the work of the partnership areas, review their business plans, report to UNEP’s Executive Directoron overall progress, and communicate overarching issues and lessons learned while promoting synergy and collaboration across partnership areas.
During the Partnership meeting, the plenary had difficulty agreeing on the details of the operational guidelines for the Partnership Advisory Group. The Chair, Gerald Sawula of Uganda, requested a small drafting group to seek consensus on the text. CIEL Senior Attorney Glenn Wiser, in his capacity as a representative of the secretariat, facilitated the small drafting group’s discussions. The group supported Mr. Wiser’s proposal that they not try to draft final text, but instead agree upon concepts, after which Mr. Wiser would render those concepts into text. With constructive participation from all of its ten government and two NGO members, the small drafting group reached consensus on all points and adjourned. Mr. Wiser, working with UNEP staff and with assistance from the NGO Natural Resources Defense Council, prepared text based upon the agreed concepts. All of the small drafting group members subsequently approved the text unanimously, as did the plenary on the Partnership meeting’s final day.
Additional Background: At its twenty-third session in 2005, the UNEP Governing Council called for mercury partnerships between governments and other stakeholders as one approach to reducing risks to human health
and the environment from the release of mercury and its compounds to the environment. Two years later, recognizing “that current efforts to reduce risks from mercury are not sufficient to address the global challenges posed by mercury,” the Governing Council decided “that further long-term international action is required to reduce risks to human health and the environment.” This “further long-term international action” includes two distinct but complementary tracks.
One track is the establishment of an ad hoc Open-ended Working Group (OEWG) tasked with reviewing and assessing options of enhanced voluntary measures and new or existing international legal instruments to address the global challenges posed by mercury. The first OEWG met in November 2007 in Bangkok, Thailand; the second (and final) OEWG is scheduled to meet in October 2008 in Nairobi, Kenya. According to its terms of reference, OEWG-2 must present options and any consensus recommendations it may have to the Governing Council. The Governing Council will consider these options and recommendations at its February 2009 meeting, with a view to taking a decision on them. CIEL prepared the study on voluntary and legally binding
options, UNEP(DTIE)/Hg/OEWG.1/2, which served as the basis for discussions at OEWG-1, and served as a legal expert to the secretariat at that meeting. Similarly, CIEL is preparing some of the secretariat’s follow-up studies for OEWG-2 and will also participate there as part of the secretariat.
The second track launched at GC-24 was for UNEP to strengthen the UNEP mercury programme partnerships, including by developing an overarching framework, which it completed at the UNEP Mercury Partnership meeting in Geneva.
For more information, please contact info@ciel.org, or visit the UNEP Mercury Programme homepage.
For a copy of the OEWG-1 study, “Analysis of Possible Options to Address the Global Challenges to Reduce Risks from Releases of Mercury” (UNEP(DTIE)/Hg/OEWG.1/2), please click here.