[ELN] UNEP/IUCN ECOLEX

["Kay Winter" <kay.winter@ea.gov.au>]

The following information about the UNEP/IUCN ECOLEX (formerly known as JELIS) which I received from INFOTERRA maybe of interest.

Kay L Winter
ELN Coordinator


In 1997 UNEP and IUCN commenced work on a joint initiative entitled JELIS (Joint Environmental Law Information Service)  which was designed to link the metainformation in IUCN's ELIS (Environmental Law Information Service) database with the full text maintained in UNEP's CELIB (Computerised Environmental Law Information Database) database. At present more than 480 treaties in ELIS are linked to the full text of over 150 treaties in CELIB. 

The Government of The Netherlands is funding the first phase of the project. A Steering Committee comprised of IUCN and UNEP representatives is providing strategic guidance for the project.  

The new service has been named ECOLEX (an acronym for environmental legislation) and the Internet domain name www.ecolex.org has been registered.  Pilot projects are underway in Burkino Faso, Costa Rica and the Philippines to produce country profiles that will feature for each country:

1) the multilateral & bilateral treaties that the country is a party to;
2) national environmental legislation; and,
3) secondary literature materials on the environment for that country.

A demo version of the publicly accessible ECOLEX prototype is available at http://www.djl.co.uk/ECOLEX 

Please take some time to look at the current version of ECOLEX which only provides information on environmental treaties but the next version will be expanded considerably to include information on:

1) national legislation
2) European Union instruments
3) soft law (regulations, directives, etc)
4) literature (articles on environmental law)
5) international court decisions

Work is in progress on 1) to 5) above and version 2 of ECOLEX should be available by the year's end.