The Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants

In one line

Adopted at Stockholm in May 2001 and expressly built on the precautionary approach in Rio Principle 15, it eliminates the chemicals in Annex A, restricts those in Annex B, minimises the by-products in Annex C, and lets a State keep using one only by registering a specific exemption that expires in five years.

What a persistent organic pollutant is

Four properties, and they are the criteria in Annex D by which a chemical is screened.

• Persistence. It resists degradation, with half-lives measured in months or years in water, soil and sediment.
• Bioaccumulation. It concentrates in fatty tissue and increases in concentration up the food chain.
• Potential for long-range environmental transport. It travels far from where it was released, in air, in water and in migratory species. Measured concentrations in remote regions are the evidence.
• Adverse effects. Toxicity or ecotoxicity, or evidence of harm to human health or the environment.

Put the four together and you have a class of chemical that older law could not handle. A substance released lawfully in one State, in quantities harmless at the point of release, appears decades later in the fat of an animal thousands of kilometres away, and in the milk of a woman who has never seen the factory. That is why the Convention regulates production and use rather than emissions, and why it is global rather than regional. Its regional predecessor, the 1998 protocol on persistent organic pollutants to the Long-Range Transboundary Air Pollution Convention, had shown the technique for Europe and North America.

Objective

Article 1. Mindful of the precautionary approach as set forth in Principle 15 of the Rio Declaration, the objective is to protect human health and the environment from persistent organic pollutants.

Article 1 is the only treaty objective in this book that names a Rio Principle in its operative text. It matters, because the precautionary approach then reappears at the decisive moments: article 8(7)(a) provides that lack of full scientific certainty shall not prevent a proposal from proceeding, and article 8(9) requires the Conference to decide in a precautionary manner whether to list a chemical.

Definitions, article 2

Article 2 is short, and its brevity is itself informative. It defines only Party, regional economic integration organization, and parties present and voting, meaning parties present and casting an affirmative or negative vote.

It does not define a persistent organic pollutant. Compare Basel article 2, twenty-one definitions, and Minamata article 2, eleven. Stockholm deliberately leaves the substantive terms to the annexes: what a persistent organic pollutant is, is settled by the Annex D screening criteria and by whether the Conference has listed the chemical, not by a sentence in article 2. The consequence is that the Convention's scope can be enlarged by listing without ever amending its operative text.