Московский журнал международного права (Feb 2019)
THE AARHUS CONVENTION IN RUSSIAN AND FOREIGN INTERNATIONAL LEGAL DOCTRINES
Abstract
INTRODUCTION. The article provides a doctrinal legal description of the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus, 25 June 1998) (hereinafter referred as the Aarhus Convention). According to the common position of the Russian and Anglo-American legal scholars, the Aarhus Convention was a new and crucial step in linking environmental protection measures with human rights, including through improved international legal mechanisms for environmental impact assessment. The few assessments of this convention in the Russian science of international law are restrained. In the Anglo-American scientific literature the scholars see legal value of this convention as a source of international law in the context of the Convention setting very specific legal standards for public participation in environmental protection measures. MATERIALS AND METHODS. The material for the study was the Aarhus Convention itself, the previous international legal instruments on environmental protection, as well as the European Union Directives defining the basis of the environmental impact assessment procedure, primarily against the background of the interpretation of these legal instruments in the Russian and Anglo-American international legal doctrine. The methodological basis of the study was general scientific and private scientific methods of cognition (dialectical method, methods of analysis and synthesis, deduction and induction), as well as special methods used in legal science, such as historical and legal, formal legal and comparative legal methods. RESEARCH RESULTS. In the article, the author critically analyzed how the Russian and AngloAmerican scientific publications on international law assesses the impact of the Aarhus Convention on the development of international environmental law. What is especially important, the conventional mechanisms are analyzed in the context of the applicable court practice to the Arctic regions. The article deals with the doctrinal interpretation of the Convention mechanisms of harmonization of socio-environmental (including environmental) and economic interests of States and their individuals, physical and legal, especially against the background of environmental law of the European Union. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSIONS. In the article the author draws the reader’s attention to the fact that the Aarhus Convention is little studied even in foreign courses of international law, especially in the Russian international legal doctrine. Having been adopted through the UN Economic Commission for Europe platform, the Aarhus Convention entered into force in 2001, the Anglo-American legal literature is considered as closely interrelated with the development of environmental regulation in the States of the European Union taking into consideration that in the Aarhus Convention that many procedural and legal elements related to public participation in decision-making on specific activities, including in the field of energy, as well as the receipt of significant environmental information by the population, have been developed. The Aarhus Convention, having had a significant impact on the development of the legal mechanisms at the intersection of the human rights and environmental sectors, is aimed at the effective harmonization of social, environmental and economic interests what is especially important for the verification of the regime of environmental protection in the Arctic.
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