At all levels, on the road to sustainable development there is a clear need for the participation of all the countries involved. Responsibility for assuring a sound environment that takes into account the rational use of natural resources and the improvement of quality of life through environmental protection rests not only on the shoulders of politicians, governments and administrations, but with all the inhabitants of this planet. This responsibility can never be shared without the establishment of effective instruments to make such participation possible. In turn, public participation is inevitably based on access to environmental information and must be secured by the guarantee of access to legal protection. Only with the development of the three fundamental tools for environmental policy — participation, information and access to justice — will it become possible to assert the principle of joint responsibility and put into practice much more committed environmental policies that allow us to advance along the road to an environmentally sustainable world and guarantee the quality of life of future generations (Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development).
In the wake of the Rio Declaration, the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe (UN ECE) provided the framework for the endorsement of the UN ECE Guidelines on Access to Information and Public Participation in Environmental Decisionmaking at the Third Ministerial Conference "Environment for Europe," held in Sofia, Bulgaria, in October 1995. And following this first step has helped those countries who endorsed the so-called Sofia Guidelines to negotiate a Convention on Public Participation that is ready to be signed at the Fourth Ministerial Conference "Environment for Europe," to be held in Aarhus, Denmark, in June 1998. The very concept of such a convention represents an important step forward in international law, and the document would harmonize the regulation of rights relating to access to information, participation and access to justice in environmental issues in a broad territorial area.
Finally, most of the countries covered by this survey are part of the European Union, which has already passed regulations designed to harmonize some of the aspects considered (e.g. Council Directive 90/313/EEC of June 7, 1990, on the freedom of access to information on the environment, and Council Directive 85/337/EEC of June 27, 1985, on the assessment of the effects of certain public and private projects on the environment). These regulations are applicable in all the EU member states.