Speaking points for High-Level Panel at Aarhus MoP-5 Maastricht, 2 July 2014 Jeremy Wates, Secretary General, European Environmental Bureau
Thank you, Chair. I would like to make three points. The world, or at least our perception of the world, changed irreversibly with the revelations by Edward Snowden last year of mass electronic surveillance. Yes, many of us suspected that some phone calls and e-mails would be tapped but the staggering scale and audacity of the surveillance where even heads of government of friendly countries were considered fair game I think took most people by surprise and has called into question whether there will ever be such a thing as a private conversation in a decade or two ahead, when our electronic accessories may no longer be outside our bodies and every square centimetre of the built and non-built environment will be overlooked by electronic eyes and ears. The Brave New World envisaged by Aldous Huxley last century is no longer a futurist fantasy. What has this got to do with our discussions today? Our meeting today is about the right to information, not about the right to privacy, you might say. I would say that it has everything to do with the topic we are discussing today. It is about transparency working in the wrong direction. While governments obtain more and more information about the activities of their citizens, the same governments continue to prevent citizens from having access to information held by public authorities. This is not the ‘information society’ we have been calling for. At the heart of the issue is the balance of power between the individual and the state. The Aarhus Convention clearly takes a side on this: it seeks to increase the power of the individual by holding the state accountable. With the Snowden revelations, we learned that the state, or some States, were surreptitiously tipping the balance in the other direction. As someone who has campaigned for many years on the right to information, I am also a passionate believer in the right to privacy and like many I was and am simply appalled at the invasion of our collective privacy revealed by Snowden. While it may be seen as an inconsistent approach to transparency, there is actually no contradiction between these positions, because in both cases it is about standing up for the individual against state power. I am of course simplifying here because not all States engage in this kind of surveillance to the same degree, and there is also the question of the relationship between government and the giant corporations who actually hold and manage the information. That would be for a longer discussion.
[Type text] The second point I want to make also relates to technology, and specifically, how technology has brought about a paradigm shift in the way information held by public authorities is made available to the public. In the past, providing information to the public meant transferring information in hard copy from a public authority or later, by e-mail, to the person requesting it. In the pre-electronic era, active dissemination was an expensive, time-consuming and cumbersome process. The public domain was an abstract concept simply meaning that information was available to anyone who wanted. The development of the worldwide web has given that concept a more concrete meaning. Not everyone is able to benefit from internet and we should not neglect the new sub-class of marginalised people who do not have such access, e.g. the aged or rural communities without proper broadband. But in numerical terms, technology has greatly simplified the practical means of making information available to large numbers of people. That said, the arguments over which information should be made public, which are addressed in paragraphs 3 and 4 of the Convention, have not changed and are only brought into clearer focus by the removal of logistical challenges such as photocopying and mailing. And in stark contrast to the advances made on the technological front, we see much more limited progress in the erosion of unjustified secrecy. Public authorities, often at the instigation of business, continue to make unjustified use of the exemptions to withhold information from the public. My third point concerns information held by the private sector. As you know, the main focus of the information pillar of the Convention is on access to information held by public authorities. By contrast, the PRTR Protocol focuses on information held in the private sector. Without saying that its implementation is perfect, the Protocol has already brought a lot of useful information into the public domain in a structured and accessible way. But the focus of the Protocol is rather narrow, focussed on releases (emissions) of pollutants into the environment and transfers from one facility to another. I believe it is time to take a step forward and expand the scope of the Protocol into a “PRTR 2.0�, to encompass resource use, products and storage. Many pollutants leave the factory in the form of products and thus escape the reporting requirements under the Protocol. Others are stored on site, representing a potential hazard. And if we want the Protocol to serve as a real driver of sustainability, it should also cover inputs such as energy, water and resources. Thank you, Chair.