Escazú Agreement: Lula sends treaty to Congress – 05/11/2023 – Environment

President Lula forwarded to Congress this Thursday (11) the Escazú Agreement on environmental democracy. Signed by Brazil and 23 other Latin American countries in 2018, the text needs to be ratified by Congress for it to become national law.

Folha had anticipated in April that the text was in the Civil House, ready to be forwarded to Congress.

The expectation of the Ministry of the Environment was that the submission to parliament would take place during the COP2 of the Escazú Agreement, three weeks ago. Minister Marina Silva represented the country at the conference as an observer.

According to government officials and interlocutors, the delay in the dispatch would have happened due to a bureaucratic slowness of the Civil House. The president’s signature was published along with 18 other dispatches.

The forwarding of the text to the Civil House was done by the Itamaraty after gathering the consent of eight ministries linked to the subject. The Agriculture portfolio was the last to agree with the matter and would be under pressure from agribusiness entities contrary to treaty commitments, such as establishing the obligation to inform the population about environmental risks.

Although pressure from agribusiness is expected during the course of the project in Congress, NGOs count on the government’s base to mobilize the approval of the Agreement.

“[A aprovação] it is part of the country’s reintegration into the world through the environmental path and also of the reconstruction of environmental governance”, says Renato Morgado, program manager at Transparência Internacional Brasil.

The announcement that Brazil is forwarding the agreement for ratification is part of the strategy to leverage the country’s regional role in the environmental agenda. Candidate to host the Climate COP30 in 2025, Brazil will have its candidacy evaluated by Latin American countries this year.

The regional agreement establishes common advances on three bases: access to information, public participation and access to justice in environmental matters. The agreement is a pioneer in providing specific protection mechanisms for environmental defenders, precisely in a region that leads the ranking of murders of activists and environmental defenders.

In the last year, Brazil was at the top of the ranking of countries that kill the most environmental defenders, according to Global Witness, followed by Colombia. Among the top 10 countries in the ranking, 7 are from Latin America.

According to lawyer and environmentalist Rubens Born, the agreement guarantees practical measures to avoid the repetition of environmental tragedies known to Brazilians.

He cites the case of the murder of indigenist Bruno Pereira and journalist Dom Phillips on the Amazon border with Colombia and Peru, last year. “Article 11 of the agreement provides for cooperation between agencies that work to prevent environmental crimes, which is very important in border areas.”

Still according to Born, the cases of breaches of Vale’s mining dams, which led to the destruction of Mariana (MG) in 2015 and Brumadinho (MG) in 2019, may also not be repeated through access to extensive information on the environmental risks, not just the impacts.

“The articles on access to information state that it must be released immediately in the event of an imminent threat, which is the opposite of what happens”, says Born. “The first reaction of the authorities is usually to withhold information so as not to create panic. The information has to be released.”

According to Joara Marchezini, project coordinator at Nupef and elected among the public representatives in the Escazú Agreement, Brazilian laws served as a reference in the construction of the agreement, which should facilitate the legal adaptation of the country to the new agreed mechanisms.

_{The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.}