The 167 Parties to the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety gathered here this week, share goals and ambitious plans, among them the commitment to public participation in decision making (article 23).
And yet, some Parties are stopping an biosafety-related important amendment to another convention from coming into force: the GMO amendment to the Aarhus Convention.
The Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation and Accesss to Justice in Environmental Matters has been ratified by 47 UNECE countries, committing themselves to a far reaching implementation of Rio's Principle 10 on Public Participation.
Unfortunately, when the Aarhus Convention was negotiated in 1998, some aspects of releasing GMOs in the environment were not included of the list of activities for which public participation in decision making has to be ensured (Annex 1 of the Aarhus Convention). In 2005, the Parties decided to correct their historic mistake with the Almaty Amandment on GMOs.
In order to come into force, the amendment needs to be ratified by three quarters of those countries that were parties to the Aarhus Convention at that time. And since then we are waiting....
Four more countries are required to ratify. Four countries out of the following 13: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, France, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Malta, Tajikistan, the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Turkmenistan and Ukraine.
All of these countries – with the exception of Turkmenistan – are Parties to the Cartagena Protocol as well. They are already commiting themselves to the provisions of both the Aarhus Convention and the Cartagena Protocol. But still, they are blocking the GMO Amendment coming into force.

The question is: Why?

As Veit Koester, former Chair of the Compliance Committees of the Cartagena Protocol (2005-08) and of the Aarhus Convention (2003-11), explained in detail at a shared Round Table on GMOs/LMOs in 2013: These two international agreements don't contradict each other.
Since MOP4 in Bonn in 2008, a fruitful cooperation between the Secretariats of the CBD and the Aarhus Convention has taken place. At MOP5, Parties “underlined the importance of of ensuring coherence among the programme of work and relevant activities of the Aarhus Convention”. The two secretariats are now asked to assist countries in ratifying and implementing the Cartagena Protocol and the Aarhus Convention through mainstreaming both instruments into national policies and programmes, joint capacity building, and a shared Checklist of Key Measures for the Ratification and Implementation of the Aarhus Convention and the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety in the context of LMOs/GMOs which is currently being drafted.
But while practical work is going on to increase the cooperation, we are still waiting for just four countries.
We call upon at least four out of these 12 Parties to the Cartagena Protocal to to ratify the GMO amendment to the Aarhus Convention as a matter of urgency.