Model Law for Enforcing Prior Informed Consent
To make multilateral environmental agreements(MEAs) work, it is necessary to develop enforceable national laws to implement their international obligations. For the MEAs on Prior Informed Consent and Persistent Organic Pollutants, a model law should help transpose the international obligations into enforceable national laws. This is the conclusion of Richard W. Emory, Jr., a senior attorney in the international enforcement and compliance program at US EPA, in a recently published article entitled, "Transposing to Enforceable National Laws the Obligations of the PIC and POPs Conventions for Imports and Exports." Emory's article appears n the 2002 Yearbook of the Colorado Journal of International Environmental Law and Policy. The article is a sequel to the author's paper published in the 2001 Yearbook that probed the problematic language and omissions of the PICC that may impair its implementation and enforceability. The new article examines the relationship between the Pops and PIC conventions and other MEAs, including the Basel Convention on Hazardous Waste, as well as the growing international awareness of the problems of MEA enforcement. At the end of the article the author presents a model national law for tracking shipments of Pops and PIC chemicals that may also be adapted to and be effective for a wide range of the substances or products that must be tracked as they are shipped internationally.

Drycleaner Receives Record Jail Sentence
A California businessman has been handed the longest jail sentence in Colorado history for an environmental crime. Hormoz Pourat was sentenced to spend 17 years in jail and pay a $100,000 fine for violating Colorado's Organized Crime Control Act by illegally disposing of hazardous wastes from a dry cleaning business. Pourat is one of the principal managers and owners of a hazardous waste management company known as AAD, which operated in Colorado and California. AAD accepted waste perchloroethylene dry cleaning solvent from dry cleaners in nine states throughout the western United States, promising to incinerate the wastes at licensed hazardous waste disposal sites. On many occasions, however, the California facility would simply falsify manifests and ship the drums of untreated waste back to Colorado, where the hazardous waste would be repackaged into cubic yard boxes. The boxes were then mislabeled and shipped for illegal disposal at hazardous waste landfills in Idaho and Nevada. Pourat's sentence was based on a grand jury indictment in the state's first ever-environmental case charging criminal racketeering. The other principal owner of the companies, Harry Pourat, is believed to have fled the country to avoid prosecution, perhaps to his native country of Iran. For more information, visit http://www.saems.org/Hazmatters/2002/nl-aug02.pdf.

Indian Court Orders Extradition of Former Union Carbide Executive
On August 28, 2002, Chief Judicial Magistrate Rameshwar Kotha of Bhopal, India ordered the Central Bureau of Investigations to begin extradition proceedings against Warren Anderson, the former Chairman of Union Carbide, a U.S.-based corporation. Anderson is charged with culpable homicide. If convicted, he faces up to 20 years in prison. The charges stem from a methyl isocyanate gas leak from the Union Carbide plant in Bhopal on December 2, 1984, which cost the lives of over 14,000 people. The order follows an effort, lead by a team of journalist and Greenpeace volunteers, which recently tracked down the elusive Mr. Anderson in Bridgehampton, Long Island, New York.