 The effort to bolster access to environmental information, participation and justice in building a more sustainable world from our corner intensifies through the Eskazoo Agreement. St. Lucia and other signatories prepare for its first conference of parties to be held later on this month in South America. Hello and welcome to another installment of Issues and Answers on the National Television Network, a production of the Government Information Service. I am Jesse Leance from the Information Unit of the Department of Sustainable Development. I'm joined by my colleague, Ms. Kate Wilson, legal officer in the Department of Sustainable Development, who will be St. Lucia's delegate in the upcoming Eskazoo COP. Kate, thank you so much for being here to speak to us about Eskazoo overall. Thank you very much, Jesse. In fact, the pleasure is all mine. Wonderful. Before we get into the upcoming event, which is monumental for Eskazoo and environmental, the space that we're in, speak to us about the prompting for this type of agreement and the origin account, really, of the Eskazoo Agreement. Okay, so the Eskazoo Agreement, which is more aptly termed the regional agreement on access to information, public participation, and justice in environmental matters, not only in the Caribbean, but also in the Latin American region. And this agreement came about way back when, in 1992, there was a conference known as, it took place in the capital of Brazil, Rio de Janeiro. It was a conference on sustainable development and the environment. And at that conference, about 179 countries unanimously agreed that environmental matters were not matters that should be dealt with by the governments alone. That they were cross-cutting in nature. And because of that, they need all stakeholders needed to be involved in the decision making, particularly the public. The public ought to be given information that is within the purview of public authorities. They should disseminate that information to the public in a timely manner. They should give the public information that, particularly information that is hazardous to their health, that is hazardous to the environment. And this whole concept of access rights, that is giving them access rights to environmental information, letting them publicly participate in the decision making and also giving them access to justice, came up again in 2012 at what was known as the Rio Plus Conference. Those countries met again in Rio de Janeiro in 2012 and again access rights was on the agenda. And 25 principles came out of this Rio de 1992 and the 2012 conferences. And the 10th principle was what was known as principle 10 speaks directly to access rights, giving access rights to environmental information. And that was the basis of the negotiations by which this Eskazu Agreement came about. Okay, wonderful. So the Eskazu Agreement is the regional agreement on access to information, public participation and justice in environmental matters in Latin America and the Caribbean. Definitely. You mentioned some of the previous treaties, environmental agreements that have been the foundation for the Eskazu Agreement. We will come to that in just a moment. But first, speak to us a little bit more about the prompting for this type of agreement. What was the region's status where access to environmental information is concerned? And is our situation unique as compared to the rest of the world? Okay, well, you find that the Caribbean region in particular, whilst we have freedom of information laws, we have environmental laws, we have fiscal planning laws, which speak indirectly to having access to information, our laws do not specifically speak to having the right to say a healthy environment. Certain regions of the world, the right to a healthy environment is already enshrined in the Constitution like the right to life or the right to associate, you know, freedom of association. So this is where, and being the Caribbean countries are such vulnerable countries in terms of our risk, our margin of risk when it comes to things like hurricanes, climate change, sea level rise, you know, biodiversity loss and that sort of thing, land degradation. It was so very important for us to have an agreement, and this agreement, this Eskazu Agreement was forged by our people of the LAC region, the Latin American and Caribbean region, for our people. So that we can now have, go to a public authority and say, listen, this project is going on in the community, and I fear it may displace my family or it may be detrimental to the biodiversity, the flora and fauna. We should have a copy of your impact assessment, or we should have some indication as to what you intend to do if we are to be displaced. You see, so these sorts of things were very, very important, and so the governments felt it was time for us to set down and negotiate an agreement that we can make this thing happen, and that is how the Eskazu Agreement has reached that far. Okay, so you spoke about the extent of the environmental concerns, our unique predicament here in the region with natural disasters and what have you, and you also mentioned development concerns. What are some of the outstanding provisions of the agreement, and how will the average St. Lucian be able to benefit from these? Okay, so the agreement has three main components. The first component is access to information, the middle component is public participation, and the third component is access to justice. Now under the first component, which is access to information, it speaks to establishing environmental information systems, and St. Lucian thankfully is way ahead of the rest of the region. We have already created an NEIS, a national environmental information system. We also have an open data portal, and we also have an open data policy. So what we are required to do therefore now is to feed our NEIS with information like the state of the environment reports, with our national adaptation plans, anything to do, our treaties that we have signed, like our CDB, our Convention on Biodiversity, the UNFCCC, and the Paris Agreement, all those things should be placed in that portal on the NEIS so that persons from the public can readily access that kind of information. The other thing that this first component speaks to, it speaks to having a recognized procedure. So where a public authority, so what the government is expected to do, what the state party is expected to do, is to designate what are known as competent authorities, and these are persons or organizations or agencies that would be, say for example, the Public Health Department, the Department of Environment. These are agencies that would normally hold information about the environment or information that is associated with the environment. And so they would have a recognized procedure so that if the public wants to get information about a pond that has mercury in it, that they can, through that recognized procedure, ask of that public authority information about that, information that maybe hazardous to the environment as well as to public health. And that competent public authority would have to go through a public interest test in terms of balancing the interest of the public to know as well as the interest of the state or the agency to withhold the information. And you know, so you would have a procedure where if they are, if they have decided for some reason that they are going to withhold the information, they have to indicate that to the person requesting the information, and they would have to give reasons. So that should be a recognized procedure. So all of that is embedded in the provisions of the Eskazoo Agreement. And we can speak of it as length, but I want to give you very briefly what the three main components. But just to stick a pin in that, we argue for our first break, St. Lucia and other signatories of the Eskazoo Agreement are preparing for the first conference of parties to be held in Chile later on this month. We will get into the details of that in just a bit. We are speaking to St. Lucia's delegate, legal officer in the Department of Sustainable Development, Miss Kate Lewis. And she's essentially St. Lucia's Eskazoo Lady. Kate Wilson. Kate Wilson, sorry, St. Lucia's Eskazoo Lady. So stay tuned for that and more coming up directly after this break. Thank you so much for staying tuned. This is an edition of Issues and Answers on NTN, a production of the Government Information Service. If you're just joining, thank you so much for doing so. We are talking the Eskazoo Agreement, the first ever conference of parties for that, of which St. Lucia is a signatory, will be happening later on this month in Chile. And we are speaking to legal officer in the Department of Sustainable Development, Miss Kate Wilson. She will be our delegate for this conference of parties. And we've been speaking so far on the Eskazoo Agreement for the benefit of the viewership who may not have heard about the Eskazoo Agreement, just giving you a brief outline of the agreement and of course what we can expect at the COP. Coming off of the break, before coming off onto the break, we had you speaking on some of the outstanding provisions of the agreement and how the average St. Lucia is able to benefit from these in full force of the agreement. And in the broader context, Kate, I want you to speak about the concerns that the agreement will help to address in our stage of development, the societal ideals that we have looking at the sustainable development goals, human rights, sustainable development overall. What impact will it have on our important sectors? You mentioned development earlier. Of course. Certainly it will have a huge impact, Jesse, because you know nothing can happen effectively. Progress and even development cannot occur unless you have access to information. If you do not have information about even the hours to go to school, you can't go to school, you understand? So if you have environmental information readily available, we can make choices about our health. We can make choices about how we develop our homes, how we structure our homes. So we can now, when we are building, we are building more sustainable homes, you understand? Because we want to make our country sustainable and resilient to disasters. We want to reduce our risks. And so having information available is going to be very, very important. And so this agreement is pivotal. It is critical, particularly at this point in time when you know we are faced with sea level rise. We are faced with, I mean you heard at the UNFCCC and COP, recently the issues that we need to lower our emissions, we need to get our sea level, get our issues on an even scale because we are coastal islands. We are islands, you understand? We are not big land masses and that have lots of money. We are tiny islands which are exposed. So having environmental information at our fingertips is critical. The second thing is public participation. And the agreement has provisions. It has for the creation of modalities where the public can give their voice. Because you hear many times people are talking about projects that the government starts or an agency starts. And then when it has impacted the environment or it has impacted the people then you understand that there is a big uproar. No, the people, the public, especially civil society, ought to be given the information beforehand and they ought to be consulted at every stage of the process. Not when harm has occurred and we want to reverse the harm. When you have killed out of the mangroves which have been nurtured for years how are you going to replace it in a year or so? No. It doesn't matter. Say a forest. How long it takes for a tree to grow. When you indiscriminately cut down our forest or you just when persons are drinking from the plastic bottles after they've bought the water and they just throw them out on the streets if they're in a vehicle and it gets into our waterways and it gets into the oceans where does it end up? In the belly of the fish. So that is why we have agreements with plastics. You just ended the United Nations Environmental Assembly and there was agreement for there to be a global agreement on plastics on controlling plastics. It's the same thing with Escazoo. This was our countries of the Latin America and the Caribbean coming together and saying listen, enough is enough. We need to get access to information. We need to get the public involved and we need to get the judiciary. The persons who are involved in the arbitration of justice to know that, listen, we need to put structures in place. We need to lower the cost of how high it is to take a matter to court. We need to put structures in place, for example a committee to support compliance and implementation. So if St. Lucia decides, okay, we have ratified but we are not going to abide by the provisions what can be done? We can take away your voting rights. You understand? Or we can put sanctions on the country. The commission and the Escazoo secretary together with the mission can send somebody down to St. Lucia and see if St. Lucia is complying with its provisions and if it is not decide, look, St. Lucia is given a particular amount of time to comply and if not we take away your voting rights or something to that effect. So the agreement speaks to all of that. More importantly, the agreement speaks to capacity building and cooperation and it speaks about cooperation in on the island like in St. Lucia between the agencies it also speaks to cooperation on an inter-island level and one of the things we have been doing is myself and Tigger and Barbuda, we have teamed up to help countries that have not even though they were very involved in the negotiations of the Escazoo agreement, have not reached the stage of ratifying. So as we are getting ready to go to next time, we have reached out to Dominica and assisted them in the mobilization effort so that they can themselves join us and ratify. And we are doing the same thing for Grenada, we'll be doing this coming week with Grenada, we'll be meeting with the Grenada officials. And so successful has this thing been that now the Bahamas wants to come on board, Trinidad and Tobago is now interested in us giving them assistance and bellies. And there is something that we need to do on the Escazoo agreement is the perfect way to start. It's inspiring that St. Lucia is in a position to be able to provide assistance to others. What stage are we at, St. Lucia at in terms of compliance with the agreement and where do we stand as compared to some of the other parties? Okay, well St. Lucia as you know we were one of the first 11 and 14 countries who signed the agreement when it was open for signature. We signed it on the 27th of September 2018, we spent two years we had a robust public awareness campaign, you remember you were part of that we did that from 2018 to 2020, St. Lucia ratified and the agreement came into force because it needed 11 countries to have ratified. Now we have 12 I think even more than 12 that have now ratified. So the agreement came into force on Mother Earth Day which was April 22nd of last year. Now the conference of parties has to be held one year after it enters into force which is why it has been held this year. But what we have done in St. Lucia is that not only have we had a robust public awareness campaign as I told you we've gone on the ground, we've gone in every community we've speak into persons on the ground, we've gone into the schools from the infant schools right up to the tertiary level. We even infiltrated the library and the summer comes for the kids we went there to spread the message to the kids. So we worked to get closely with Dr. Marie Louise Felix who is at the highest tertiary institution, the Southwest Community College, and we teamed up with the person, the focal point at the Department of Sustainable Development, Jean-Elvon who is the person for Sustainable Development Goals. So we wrote a message where I was speaking about the Eskazoo Agreement, she was speaking about how it fits into the whole achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals to the kids and to the students because they're not kids the grown-ups at Southwest Community College and it was such a marvelous thing they were so very interested. The Eskazoo Secretariat that is the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, Eklak based in Santiago de Chile they have an online course that you can take it's free of charge to get to know about the Eskazoo Agreement and so we were speaking to Sir Arthur Louise to see if they can introduce it into the Sustainable Development Program because they teach a very hands-on course there at Sir Arthur Louise Community College so a lot is happening. What I really want to see as well and I'm so very happy about that. We have to take a break, I'm getting the wood from the producer. We're going to take a break, when we come back we're going to hear from you on that and I also want to find out how conducive is our institutional and legal frameworks for an agreement of this nature. Do stay with us. Thank you so much for staying tuned. You are watching Issues and Answers on NTN. We're talking the Eskazoo Agreement and the first ever conference of parties to be held for this agreement being made in our part of the world the Latin America and Caribbean region. We are speaking to the delegate who will be representing Saint Lucia later on this month in Chile and she's been speaking to us about Eskazoo, the agreement, the origins from the start of our interview all the way down to the levels of work that has been achieved so far since our signing onto this agreement. So we had to break you for us to go to a break. You can continue and we will continue with the questions. Right so very quickly what I want to see Jesse is that I'm so thrilled that our cabinet of ministers has endorsed and adopted our concept note. Now what is our concept note? Our concept note is that document which is our blueprint for how we are going to implement the provisions of the Eskazoo Agreement. I mean over the Easter holidays last Easter I sat down and I went with a fine tooth comb to see what it is that we need to do at the national level to ensure that we effectively implement this agreement. And the agreement is very clear on what should be in its place. It has the establishment of a pollutants register you know it has the NEIS as I said it also speaks to having independent oversight mechanism so all of that is in that concept note so I'm so thrilled. What's the significance of that coming from the approval from cabinet? Because without cabinet endorsements we don't have buying from the public we need the approval of cabinet because these are national things that we are going to be put in place. We are going to have to look at our constitution to ensure that it includes access rights so we couldn't do that on our own without cabinet's approval. If we are going to amend our legislation to ensure it has it is very clear in terms of access rights provisions we need cabinet's approval for that. So a lot of the establishments and the procedural and institutional frameworks that we needed to do we needed the approval of the highest authority which is why that concept note endorsement was so very important. Wonderful. Which leads to my next point asking about how can conducive are the institutional and legal frameworks for Eskazoo's provisions. You've just yeah. Well as I mentioned very briefly before there are we have three levels of of legislation in St. Lucia that speaks to access rights. We have our freedom of information laws. We have our environmental laws. We have our physical planning laws and of course we have our constitution. But you find that those laws that we have presently they just speak to access rights on the periphery. They are not clear in terms of saying we we have a right to a healthy environment. So we need to what we are doing and we have already started because the World Resources Institute had chosen St. Lucia as one of among three other islands to review our legislation and to make recommendations and one of the main recommendations was for us to enact the freedom of information bill which has been around for a while. But what we are doing is because this thing has been has been there for a while and was never passed. We are now reviewing it. We are looking at it again to see how we can put access rights to environmental information. Make it very very explicit in the provisions. Not something that we need we have to look we have to see through. So that when you pick up the legislation and look at it it's very precise on that. We want to look at our constitution to see you know how conducive it is to make the right to a healthy environment you know a fundamental right. So these are the things we are doing now at the moment. And as I said all of the other things that we are we have put in place in that concept note. Now that the cabinet has approved it we are getting ready to meet with the different agencies because obviously you know as I said before environmental issues are cross-cutting issues. We cannot do it on our own. The Department of Sustainable Development cannot do it on its own. So the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean ECLAC which is the secretariat for the Eskazoo Agreement. They have an enhanced program of action for the implementation of the Eskazoo Agreement. They signed an MOU with the OECS Commission. So we are working closely with the OECS Commission. They have already held that is ECLAC's statistical division has worked with our statistical office, our CSO in Centusia and the Department of Sustainable Development to develop environmental indicators together with a number of other agencies. So we are going to be meeting with those agencies again. We are going to come back to the judiciary. Remember earlier on we had met with our chief justice, our judges, our masters, so we are going to be doing that again because now we are not just going to ask them their opinion. Now we are ready to put structures in place to get down to the nitty-gritty. On to the endorsement of the cabinet. Yes. That is it. And I'm sure you're beaming with pride going into cop with this approver from cabinet. I am so happy. I am so ecstatic. We're running out of time but tell us a little bit more about the conference of parties when where is it happening? Okay so very briefly it is going to be held on the 22nd of April to the 20th of April to the 22nd in Santiago de Chile. It is going to be at the headquarters of the Escobar Secretariat. So it is going to be at ECLAX headquarters, which is in downtown Santiago. On the first day, well on the 19th, which is the day preceding the opening of the meeting, there will be a meeting of an official meeting of the presiding officers. Then on the Monday, which is the 20th, there is going to be the official opening of the meeting. So please please tune in so you can see the representation on behalf of your country. So login. So we have the official opening. Then there will be, if very briefly, there will be a special session. No, first of all, the countries are going to be speaking about the actions which have been taken at the national level. So we'll be reporting on what is happening in Centrucia. The countries are going to be speaking about the actions which have been taken at the national level. So we have a special session which is towards effective implementation of the Escobar agreement and greater cooperation. Then on the Thursday, which is the 22nd, we'll be dealing with the rules of procedure. Because you know the COP, for it to function effectively, it has to agree on its rules. So for the past few days, leading up to the conference of parties, we've talked about the committee on compliance and implementation. So we'll be discussing that and the COP has to endorse that. Also the financial provisions, how are we going to pay for all those things that we intend to do? So the voluntary fund, all of that is going to be discussed at the COP. Then remember it is going to be the anniversary of the first of the entry into force. On Earth Day. April 22nd, which is the Friday, there's going to be a huge celebration. So ECLAC has wonderful things for us. But we will be hosting a side event on the Escobar agreement. The theme is the Escobar agreement as a catalyzing tool towards more just, responsive, and gender inclusive societies. So we have a wonderful panel there. We have Mr. Chamberlain Emmanuel from the OECS commission. We have Mr. Jose Luis Samaniego from the ECLAC, from the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean. We have Ms. Ruth Spence from the Meeper Trust of Trinidad. We have Ms. Compton Antoine Janine Compton from the Solution National Trust. We have a group from Belize. So we have a wonderful panel and we're asking you to please, when we together with the GIS, we are going to be putting out the links so that you can log in and listen to the conference of parties, the first ever of the Escobar agreement. We do invite the general public to follow the Department of Sustainable Development's platforms where we will be featuring the various events of the COP for the Escobar agreement. Sustainable Development of St. Lucia on the Facebook platform. On Instagram we susdevslu s-u-s-d-e-v-s-l-u You can go on there and also on our LinkedIn platform, the same names as well to support and be part of the movement that is the Escobar agreement. My name is Jesse Leance. It's all the time that we have for now in this installment of Issues and Answers taking a look at the first ever conference of parties for the Escobar agreement. Do stay tuned for more programming on the NTN. Goodbye. .