In June, 1998, the environment ministers of 35 member countries of the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN-ECE) signed the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters at a meeting in Aarhus, Denmark. Commonly referred to as the Aarhus Convention, the convention established standards for ensuring public access to environmental information and public participation in environmental decisionmaking.  The Aarhus Convention marked the culmination of almost two years of negotiations among the governments and members of civil society, including the Regional Environmental Center for Central and Eastern Europe (REC) and other non-governmental organizations from Central and Eastern Europe, which played a major role in achieving this remarkable result.  A key test of how the Convention works in practice will come as many of the countries that signed the Aarhus Convention strives to achieve Europe's greatest environmental priorities: cleaning up the Danube River. Reliable and effective public access to environmental information will be an important tool in mobilizing public support for a cleaner Danube, and in stimulating governments to act on the Danube Strategic Action Plan, and Danube Pollution Reduction Programme.  In response to these needs, REC, Resources for the Future in Washington, D.C. (RFF), and the New York University School of Law in New York City (NYU) have joined to create a training and technical assistance pilot project designed to make compliance with the Aarhus Conventio reality rather than aspirations.  The pilot project, entitled "Building Environmental Citizenship to Support Transboundary Pollution Reduction in the Danube River: A Pilot Project in Hungary and Slovenia", provides support to government officials and civil society members from Hungary and Slovenia as they translate the requirements of the Aarhus Convention into effective domestic programmes to facilitate public access to information about Danube pollution. These efforts will help Hungary and Slovenia achieve their commitments to Danube restoration. The needs of these countries, as they seek to achieve the goal of public access to environmental information, include adequate domestic implementing legislation and improvements in how environmental information is collected and disseminated to the public.  The project will help develop practical measures for public access to environmental information and participation in environmetal decision-making that meet the special circumstances existing in these two countries, which are also leading candidates for accession to the European Union.

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