2026

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Paolo Solano Tovar is a senior international lawyer with more than 25 years of experience at the interface of international trade and environmental law, including nearly two decades at the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC) in Montréal. The CEC is a treaty-based intergovernmental institution established by Canada, Mexico, and the United States under the North American Agreement on Environmental Cooperation (NAAEC) and continued under Chapter 24 of the Canada-United States-Mexico Agreement (CUSMA) and the Environmental Cooperation Agreement. Since 2006, he has served in the CEC's Office of Legal Affairs, first as Legal Officer in the Submissions on Enforcement Matters (SEM) Unit and, since 2020, as Director of Legal Affairs of SEM. SEM is a treaty-based accountability mechanism established under Articles 14-15 of the NAAEC and continued under Articles 24.27–24.28 of CUSMA. The public and NGOs can make submissions to SEM asserting that a Party has failed to effectively enforce its environmental law. Each submission moves through a structured process: Secretariat review, government response, and, where warranted, a factual record. This process directly links public participation to enforcement and accountability.

 

Mr. Solano has made a distinguished contribution to international law and organizations in three main ways: through his sustained stewardship of SEM, through the interpretation and application of international law, and as a result of his diffusion and awareness-raising of international environmental law.

 

Over nearly two decades, Mr. Solano has helped direct, sustain, and modernize the SEM process (including determinations, notifications, and factual records) and advised the Council, Secretariat, and member governments on institutional, procedural, and substantive questions. He led SEM's legal transition from NAFTA/NAAEC to CUSMA, modernized internal legal policies, preserved the process's neutrality, and created the CEC Environmental Defenders Protocol, the first framework of its kind among trilateral environmental treaty organizations.

 

His stewardship of the SEM spans landmark matters across all three Parties where he supported or supervised determinations and factual records and safeguarded the Secretariat's independence, including in Alberta Tailings Ponds II, North Atlantic Right Whale, Tren Maya, Vaquita Porpoise, Avocado Production in Michoacán, and Hydraulic Fracturing in Nuevo León. Since 2006, he has addressed more than 60 submissions from Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

 

Throughout his CEC tenure, Mr. Solano has interpreted and applied treaty law, the law of international organizations, privileges and immunities law, and international administrative law. He played a key role in negotiating and finalizing the CEC-Canada Headquarters Agreement, securing the organization's legal continuity ahead of CUSMA's 2020 entry into force, and continues to advise on privileges and immunities, staff immunities, tax exemptions, and archival inviolability under that Agreement. As head of the Office of Legal Affairs, he supervises a multinational legal team and oversees institutional governance, procurement, grants, cooperation agreements, and data protection. He has also served in senior delegation roles on CEC factual-record missions to Mexico, including the Loggerhead Turtle, Hydraulic Fracturing, and Vaquita Porpoise matters.

 

Mr. Solano has advanced public understanding of international environmental law by promoting SEM as a practical model of treaty-based accountability, connecting the public, communities, NGOs, and practitioners to a transparent enforcement and review process. Since 2008, he has contributed to Oxford University Press's Yearbook of International Environmental Law, sole authoring and co-authoring the CEC institutional chapter (2008–2020; 14 chapters) and the Mexico country chapter (2014–present; 10 chapters). He has also published law review articles and other book chapters. He has presented over 100 times in English, French, and Spanish across Canada, Mexico, and the United States on SEM, CUSMA Chapter 24, access to environmental justice, and treaty-based accountability, reaching law students, academics, practitioners, and government representatives. He has mentored numerous interns through the CEC's trilingual, trilateral work. Additionally, he routinely supports practitioners at other international legal bodies and SEM-like tribunals under trade agreements involving Central American countries, the Dominican Republic, Peru, Columbia and Panama.

 

Mr. Solano is highly respected because he has led by example: he has sustained a distinctive North American process in which treaty commitments are invoked by the public, examined by an independent Secretariat, and made visible through reasoned factual records. What distinguishes Mr. Solano is that he could have discharged the technical duties of his position and no more. Instead, at each stage of his career at the CEC, he chose to treat SEM not merely as an administrative process to be managed, but as a body of law to be made real: defended in its neutrality, adapted to institutional change, and made intelligible to the public it exists to serve. As his nominators observe, he "has helped translate North America's environmental cooperation framework into lawful institutional decisions, operational continuity, protected international legal status, and accountable treaty practice." This was confirmed repeatedly in the letters of support. As one such letter put it, he “made international law from the inside: through the interpretation and defense of a treaty regime, the construction of the procedural and evidentiary architecture by which that regime actually functions, and the daily operation of one of the most innovative accountability mechanisms in contemporary international environmental governance.” It is this sustained, voluntary commitment to giving international environmental law practical effect that merits recognition with the Read Medal, in the committee’s view.

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