Enforcement and Compliance

• Better Tracking of Transboundary Hazardous Waste Shipments
• Improved Compliance Assistance Along the U.S.-Mexico Border
• On-line Training to Identify Illegal Trade in Dangerous Chemicals
• Efforts to Stop Non-Compliant Imports
• Efforts to Stop the Illegal Trade in Wildlife
• Specialization in Environmental Law

Tracking hazardous waste shipments across North America’s borders requires close cooperation between environmental agencies. CEC is helping to make this process more effective and efficient.

Government outreach and education to targeted businesses helps promote compliance with the law. CEC is helping facilitate this effort along the U.S.-Mexico Border.

Ensuring safe, expeditious, and compliant trade in North America of environmentally regulated materials is critical to the success of NAFTA. CEC’s on-line training program is helping prevent illegal trade in environmentally regulated materials.

Noncompliant imports entering North America pose threats to human health and the environment. CEC provides a forum for government officials to coordinate their efforts to address these threats.

Trafficking in wildlife is a big business around the globe. CEC is helping to promote efforts to stop the illegal trade in rare and exotic plants and animals.

The judiciary plays a key role in protecting human health and the environment.

CEC is working to support efforts to build judicial knowledge of environment law in Mexico.

The CEC is working on a project that will allow the governments of Canada, Mexico and the United States to replace their current paper-based system of tracking transboundary shipments of hazardous waste and hazardous recyclable materials with an electronic-based system.

What are the benefits of this project?

Governments will be able to exchange hazardous waste export request and consent information electronically. Gone will be the mailings, faxes, piles of paper and manual data entry. This will reduce government administrative burdens, improve data quality, and make it easier to provide data to environmental enforcement and border protection agencies.

Electronic data exchange will facilitate the adoption of emerging tracking technologies and help the governments provide more timely and coherent information on what crosses their national borders.

It will also enhance compliance. The new electronic system will include information on shipment requirements, allowing the governments to compare shipping requirements with the actual shipment information in order to determine possible violations.

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Many businesses are involved in the transboundary movement of hazardous waste: for example, generators, brokers, transporters, exporters, importers and disposal facilities. The CEC works with the governments and the private sector to ensure that the regulated community is educated and informed of the legal requirements for trading these wastes.

The CEC helps support the development of a U.S.-Mexico Border Center. This center offers easy access to plain-language materials and other resources on environmental compliance with the laws governing the transboundary movement of hazardous waste in both the United States and Mexico. It provides links to compliance documents, tools and information and offers and on-line discussion groups.

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The international trade in hazardous wastes and dangerous chemicals needs to be carefully managed. One molecule of certain ozone depleting substances can destroy an estimated 100,000 ozone molecules and have a life span of 100 years. Hazardous wastes can be ignitable, corrosive, unstable under normal conditions, and toxic.

To ensure the safe, expeditious, and compliant trade in environmentally regulated materials such as dangerous wastes and chemicals, the CEC is developing on-line training for each party’s border inspectors and other law enforcement officials to detect, identify, analyze, and enforce against illegal shipments. These trainings will also have important public components to help the public understand issues associated with the trade in these substances.

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The illegal trade in wildlife is a serious problem worldwide. It’s a massive, multi-billion dollar business. People in North America are buyers and sellers of goods ranging from tiger bone and bear gall bladders for medicinal uses, live birds for pets, orchids for gardens and rare furs for clothing apparel.

Smugglers illegally traffic a staggering variety of wild species, often with devastating consequences for the species involved. Mexico, with its rich diversity of species, is a target for many of these smugglers. Many consumers of these illegal goods are in the United States and Canada.

Because of this, Canada, Mexico and the United States, must closely coordinate their efforts to stop this illegal trafficking in wildlife. To help in this effort, the CEC supports efforts by the North American Wildlife Enforcement Group, a network of senior wildlife enforcement officials, to improve policing and prosecution of laws on wildlife.

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Canada, Mexico and the United States have a broad range of laws that protect air, water, natural resources, wildlife and public health. These laws give the governments, and in some instances citizens, authority to enforce those laws through statutorily prescribed penalties, sanctions, and other remedies.

The role of the judiciary in environmental enforcement actions is to provide impartial adjudication of disputes arising from these efforts to enforce the law, and to interpret and apply the law in an impartial and transparent manner. Although the legal systems in Canada, Mexico and the United States are very different from one another, in each of these systems the judiciary plays a key role in protecting human health and the environment.

To promote these efforts, the CEC has been building networks between judicial institutions in North America and supporting judicial workshops in Mexico on the specialization of environmental law in Mexico.

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