Description
The IUCN Environmental Law Centre (ELC) was established in Bonn in 1970. The ELC is part of the ICUN staff acting as legal secretariat of the ICUN, which is located in Gland, Switzerland. A few other lawyers are employed in the IUCN regional offices. The IUCN ELC has a staff of five lawyers and several documentation offices working with FAO and UNEP on the joint initiative ECOLEX, which is a database of environmental legislation and other related material and information. FAO provides information on national legislation, while UNEP on court decisions and the ELC on international agreements and literature.
The ELC is part of a network of environmental law expertise including the IUCN Environmental Law Programme (ELP) and it works in collaboration with the IUCN bodies, notably:
- IUCN Commission on Environmental Law
- IUCN headquarters and regional and country offices (42 all around the world)
- Academy of environmental law
The Environmental Law Programme (ELP) provides the principal source of environmental law expertise to the IUCN Programme. The work of ELP is carried out by the IUCN Environmental Law Centre (ELC) and the IUCN Commission on Environmental Law (CEL), in collaboration with IUCN Regional and Country Programmes as well as IUCN�s Global Thematic Programmes.
The ELP supports the development and implementation of international and national environmental law, provides technical assistance and promotes capacity building in developing countries, while also maintaining the world's premier environmental law information and database service.
The main objective of the IUCN ELC is the further development of IEL through providing assistance and capacity buildings in many countries.
The main activities of the IUCN ELC are:
- Providing technical assistance
- Capacity buildings activities such as providing trainings, fellowship programmes in cooperation with UNITAR
- Hosting fellows and interns from around the world dealing with IEL
ELC does not provide trainings or courses in house but it pursues these activities on a project by project basis. ELC will organise a training course in the south Caucasus in 2009 on nature conservation (objective: to assist these countries to approach the acquis communautaire); the target audience is people from ministries and NGOs. The training is funded by the German government, through the INVENT agency. ELC activities are sometimes also supported by the Commission of environmental law, depending on the type of projects concerned.
IUCN had a specialist group in the commission of environmental law with a mandate on enforcement and compliance and a few years ago a colloquium on this topic was organised by the AEL.
The AEL focuses on academic work and teaching of IEL, while the Commission of environmental law deals with other issues and networking. The commissions are re-established every four years and had their latest congress in October 2008, in Barcelona, where they adopted a decision on new environmental protection issues to be considered by the IUCN.