PluriCourts, the Center of Excellence for the Study of the Legitimacy of International Courts and Tribunals at the University of Oslo, will host the 14th Annual Colloquium of the IUCN Academy of Environmental Law. This event will be held in Oslo, the capital of Norway, 20 – 24 June.

The aim of the conference is to gather academics working with environmental issues, especially legal practitioners, as well as judges, adjudicators, arbitrators, mediators and members of tribunals that deal with environmental matters, and civil society, to discuss procedural and substantive aspects of environmental adjudication.The Academy will publish an edited and peer-reviewed collection of selected papers following the colloquium.

The topic for the 2016 Colloquium is “The Environment in Court – Environment protection in national and international courts, tribunals, and compliance mechanisms”. This broad topic seeks to address procedural and substantive aspects of environmental adjudication, both in national, regional and international courts, tribunals as well as non-compliance mechanisms of multilateral environmental treaties. In the context of the Sustainable Developments Goals, Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration as well as the Aarhus Convention, the idea of strengthening of an environmental rule of law through access to justice has gathered considerable momentum.The main questions to explore by this colloquium relate to what the role is, should be and could be for the judiciary in promoting environmentally sustainable development? What progresses and advances have been made in protecting the environment through courts and which obstacles exist to enhancing effective environmental adjudication? The colloquium attempts to address these issues along various, crossing “axes”: national and international adjudication, procedural and substantive legal issues, comparisons of different legal systems, and the relationships between policy and law, input and outcome, lex lata and lex ferenda, law and ethics, effectiveness and equity.

For registration instructions and additional information, please see: http://iucnael2016.no/registration/