At the beginning of June 2013, Sunce’s lawyers, Patricia Granić and Ivana Grubišić, were the hometown of the world’s largest nonprofit law firm – ClientEarth, which has offices in London and Warsaw as well as in Brussels.

The visit to this law office lasted from June 4th to June 6th through the project “Dialogue with Civil Society for a Better Environment – Training of Civil Society Organizations for Monitoring and Encouraging the Implementation of the Aarhus Convention in Croatia” implemented by Green Istria in cooperation with several partner environmental organizations – Green Action from Zagreb, Eko-Palo from Karlovac and ZEO Nobilis from Čakovec.

Project co-authors are legal experts from the Faculty of Law Zagreb, the Ministry of Environmental Protection and Nature and the Country Public Administration School. In addition, lawyers Željka Leljak-Gracin and Enes Ćerimagić from Green Action, students of the Faculty of Law in Zagreb, Tanja Dvorski and Andreja Trupčević and the project leader Dušica Radojčić from Green Istria were also visited by lawyers from the Sun.

In unexpectedly hot and sunny Brussels they were welcomed by the founder of CliertEarth James Thorton, while the hosts were prof. Ludwig Kramer, head of the EU Aarhus Center and attorney Anais Berthier.

ClientEarth’s mission is to protect the environment through available legal instruments, initiate proceedings before courts and administrative bodies, with the aim of creating good environmental practices. In this sense, ClientEarth has also established the European Center for Aarhus Convention with the aim of providing legal advice to citizens and non-governmental organizations alike, with regard to providing information, public participation and access to justice. It is already apparent from this fact that its work focused on the effective implementation of Aarhus Convention provisions through European environmental legislation. We recall, the Aarhus Convention or the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation and Access to Justice establishes environmental rights as a reliable basis for citizen inclusion in environmental policy and, in order to achieve this, the public must be informed and involved in the process of adoption decision.

Knowledge of European environmental law and cooperation with European counterparts on the Croatian civilian environmental scene will be of utmost importance after Croatia joins the European Union on 1 July. 2013.