States can assist courts, tribunals, and other related institutions through a variety of general and specific measures. Some of the general, institutional measures include:
- Making sure that the general workload of the judiciary is manageable (and that the judges are not asked to deal with more cases than they have capacity to address, regardless of whether the cases relate to the environment);
- Ensuring that the lawyers, judges have a general understanding of the importance of environmental issues;
- Providing the necessary reference materials and information to the judges; and
- Maintaining statistics on environmental cases.
In addition, specific forms of assistance can include:
- Compendia of relevant national and sub-national laws, regulations, and guidelines, as well as MEAs to which the State is a Party;
- Casebooks and reports that include the full text of environmental cases (ideally with some form of annotation and indexing that makes it easier to find the relevant cases);
- Casebooks and reports that include cases from around the world (such as the UNEP compendia, described in the case study on “UNEP’s Judges Programme”);
- Training on environmental law, regulations, and policy (including both the substantive law as well as procedural aspects such as evidence, locus standi, and remedies);
- Use of court-appointed experts to assist the judge in resolving complex litigation questions (such as causation and extent of harm); and
- Guidelines, toolkits, and other references for judges involved in environmental matters. These may be developed by governmental agencies, by universities, or by MEA Secretariats. For example, Belize and Guyana have developed sentencing guidelines for environmental cases, and CITES is developing a kit for the judiciary; see also the case study on “Federal Sentencing Guidelines in the United States” above. See also UNEP, Judicial Handbook on Environmental Law (2005)