Nine of the fifteen largest contributors to the UN Environment Programme’s Environment Fund are EU Member States. Those fifteen together provide more than 90% of the Fund’s income. At the UN Environment Assembly (UNEA) in December 2025, the Union and its Member States sent around 200 delegates. Yet in the principal negotiation launched by the organisation, on a global treaty against plastic pollution, the rule of procedure determining whether the Union may vote, and on what terms, has never been formally adopted. It has remained in brackets since 2022.
Who negotiates for Europe, and in what capacity
There is a structural reason for that uncertainty. Europe participates in these forums in two different forms, and its standing in the Assembly is not the same as its status under the treaties.
The Programme dates from 1972. Its governing assembly took its present form after the 2012 Rio+20 Conference, when membership was opened to all 193 UN Member States. It was this Assembly that adopted, in March 2022, resolution 5/14 “End plastic pollution”, calling for an intergovernmental negotiating committee (the INC) to develop an instrument covering the full life cycle of plastic, from production to disposal.
Within that Assembly, Europe appears twice. The 27 Member States sit as full members, each with a vote. The Union itself sits as an observer: the rules of procedure list regional economic integration organisations (REIOs) among observers— the category the UN uses for bodies that join treaties alongside their own members. They allow such an organisation to participate in the deliberations under the same arrangements that apply to their participation in the work of the General Assembly. 
The status is different under the treaties themselves. The Programme provides secretariat functions for a series of conventions, among them Basel, Rotterdam, Stockholm and Minamata. In those agreements, the Union is a party in its own rights, alongside its Member States, as Article 191(4) of the TFEU allows. Europe therefore negotiates on two tiers: the Union brings a single prepared position, while the Member States bring the votes.
An arrangement that works, and is paid for
On paper, the arrangement works. The seventh session of the Assembly (UNEA-7), held in Nairobi in December 2025, adopted eleven resolutions, three decisions, and a Ministerial Declaration. According to a note submitted to the Environment Council, the Union and its Member States met the objectives they had set, and the resolutions adopted on sustainable artificial intelligence, minerals and metals, chemicals and waste, and enhanced participation of children and youth reflected European priorities.
Europe also pays for it. The Programme relies on voluntary contributions for more than 95% of its resources. The Commission committed €21.5 million in earmarked funding in 2025, and a new annex to the memorandum of understanding between the Commission and the Programme was agreed upon in March 2026 for the period 2026-2029.
However, money is not the whole story. The Union drafts and co-sponsors resolutions, coordinates positions across 27 capitals before each session, and funds the participation of delegations that could not otherwise attend. In a forum of 193 members, that preparatory work is a substantial part of what determines which texts reach the floor at all.
The results, however, were thinner than the numbers suggest. Close to 20 resolutions and decisions were tabled at the outset, but only 11 were eventually adopted; four failed outright, including a European priority on crimes affecting the environment. And the plastics talks, the largest process the Assembly has launched, remain stalled altogether, even though Europe was prepared and had provided substantial funding.
When procedure becomes the subject of the negotiation
The deadlock comes from somewhere else, and its origins are closer to home than the usual account suggests.
Europe has not settled the question internally either. Twice, its own institutions have gone to the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) over who is entitled to speak. In Commission v Sweden (Case C-246/07, 2010), the Court held that Sweden had failed to fulfill its obligations by unilaterally proposing to list a chemical under the Stockholm Convention. The reasoning bears directly on the present problem: the Convention prevents a regional organisation from voting if any of its Member States votes, and vice versa. So, a single national initiative can deprive the Union of the possibility of casting a number of votes equal to that of its Member States. In the Antarctic marine protected areas cases (Joined Cases C-626/15 and C-659/16, 2018), the position was reversed. The Commission wanted proposals submitted on behalf of the Union alone. The Council decided to submit them on behalf of the Union and its Member States; the Commission challenged that decision, and lost. The requirement of unity constrains the Commission as much as the capitals. Both judgments showed that the question of who speaks for Europe remains genuinely open.
The question of whether the EU may vote in the plastics talks was first raised in Dakar, in 2022, and has never been answered. At the open-ended working group that met there, participants could not agree on the draft rule concerning voting rights, because of disagreement over those of REIOs. The Union wished to retain the wording used in other negotiations, including that of the Minamata Convention. The United States, along with Saudi Arabia and other delegations, preferred wording restricting participation to members duly accredited and present at the session. Four bracketed options were forwarded to INC-1. In UN negotiations, text in square brackets is text on which there is no agreement: as long as the brackets remain, the provision has not been adopted.
The wording at issue is not new. REIOs have joined multilateral environmental agreements for decades, and the clause governing how they vote is close to standard: it appears in the Stockholm Convention, in Minamata, and in most of the treaties UNEP serves. The Union did not go to Dakar seeking a new prerogative. It asked for the formula under which it already operates elsewhere. What is new is that the formula was reopened.
The dispute then widened beyond the EU’s own standing. At the closing plenary of the first committee, Saudi Arabia argued that nothing is agreed until everything is agreed, Russia argued that the rules were only a draft open to reopening, and India argued that Rules 37 and 38 were inseparable. Rule 38 is the one allowing a decision by a two-thirds majority where consensus fails. At the second committee, in 2023, the procedural argument disrupted the session’s timetable. At the opening of the Geneva session in August 2025, the Chair again recalled that the rules applied provisionally, with the exception of those in brackets, including Rule 38.1. That session ended without consensus on a text.
With no clearly applicable rule, the committee can only decide by consensus, giving every delegation a de facto veto. Raising the question of the EU’s standing commits no one to a substantive position, exposes no one politically, and consumes negotiating time. It can be raised again at any session, indefinitely. Each negotiation session has therefore opened with the same unresolved question available to any delegation that wishes to raise it, and at least two sessions have lost working time to the issue before substantive negotiations could begin.
Three measures, and one limit
Europe cannot dissolve the substantive opposition. It can, however, remove the material on which the procedural objection feeds.
First, procedural rules should be settled before substantive negotiations begin. A rule in brackets does not expire, and it is not a technicality. It can be used to reopen the process at any moment, particularly when pressure is mounting. Four years after Dakar, the plastics committee still has no answer either on how the Union votes or on whether a vote is possible at all. The Union has begun to act on this elsewhere. In March 2026, ahead of the first Conference of the Parties to the agreement on marine biodiversity, it submitted a written contribution on that body’s future rules of procedure, together with a table comparing the voting clauses used in other international agreements. It is the right instinct, and it should not be an exception.
The second thing within Europe’s control is its own ratification record, which directly determines the EU’s voting weight. The marine biodiversity agreement (which falls under the law of the sea rather than under UNEP) entered into force in January 2026 with the Union and only sixteen Member States among its Parties. Article 64 of that agreement gives a regional organisation a number of votes equal to the number of its member States that are Parties. Sixteen ratifications therefore mean sixteen votes rather than twenty-seven. No Member State is under obligation to ratify. The other eleven are simply those that have not yet done so. But the logic is Europe’s own; no other delegation can be blamed for it.
The third thing is the one that actually moves texts. In a body that decides by consensus, a proposal succeeds because enough delegations rally behind it, not because the voting rule is well drafted. Europe knows this: the new annex to the MoU with UNEP names coalition-building among its priorities, with a view to the Rio conventions and the resumption of the plastics talks. It must be noted that a settled voting rule is worth little without allies, and allies are harder to hold together when the process can be reopened at will.
The financial context also adds urgency. UNEP’s budget advisory committee has noted an expected fall of more than 10% in Environment Fund income in both 2025 and 2026. Europe is being asked to sustain a system whose rules it has not secured, at a moment when its contribution counts for more than ever.
None of these measures changes the balance of substantive positions. In Geneva, the draft treaty article on production caps remained entirely in brackets, with a group of states led by Saudi Arabia and Russia calling for its deletion. Getting the procedure right does not win the argument; it only allows Europe to make one. Leaving it unresolved for four years, however, is too long.
The resumed session of February 2026 in Geneva was mainly organisational: it allowed a new chair, the Chilean ambassador Julio Cordano, to be elected, but involved no substantive negotiation. Substantive talks are expected to resume later in 2026. They will be held under rules of procedure that remain incomplete, with two rules having been pending for four years. This does not appear on any published list of priorities; yet, it seems like it should.
