Membership

A fifteen-member Compliance Committee was established by the adoption of the Compliance procedures under Article 17 of the Stockholm Convention. Members shall be experts nominated by Parties and elected by the Conference of the Parties on the basis of equitable geographical representation of the five regional groups of the United Nations, with due consideration to gender balance. Members shall have expertise and specific qualifications in the subject matter covered by the Convention. They shall act objectively and in the best interests of the Convention.

The Committee shall elect its own Chair. A Vice-chair and a rapporteur shall be elected, on a rotating basis, by the Committee in accordance with rule 30 of the rules of procedure of the Conference of the Parties.

Members and officers of the Committee:


At its twelfth meeting, the Conference of the Parties elected the first cohort of members of the Committee, bearing in mind that no decision was taken on the election of members from the Eastern Europe region:

  • Leo Andersson 
  • Hassan Azhar 
  • Obed Meringo Baloyi
  • Jimena Nieto Carrasco (Chair)
  • Keima Gardiner 
  • Mark Govoni (Vice-Chair)
  • Jennifer Kutesakwe (Rapporteur)
  • Michael Onwona-Kwakye 
  • Francisco Nelson Linhares de Almeida Júnior 
  • Sajad Motaharnia 
  • Helga Schrott 
  • Wei Yao 

Membership of the Committee since 2025

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Helga Schrott is a public servant in the Austrian Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry, Climate and Environmental Protection, Regions and Water Management and a legal expert for national, European and international law on chemicals.

She was involved in Twinning, an European Union instrument for institutional cooperation between public administrations of EU Member States and partner countries which empowers civil servants around the world to implement more effective and efficient public policies. She participates in negotiations on multilateral environmental agreements including the Stockholm Convention on POPs and other frameworks like the Global Framework on Chemicals (GFC). She also is the national focal Point for the Rotterdam Convention and works for the Austrian DNA, and national focal Point for the Minamata Convention on Mercury and national focal point for the GFC. Helga Schrott leads the national coordination platform on international and European issues relating to chemicals and waste policy of the BRS Conventions, Minamata Convention and the GFC.

She served as a member of the implementation and compliance committee of the Minamata Convention on Mercury until 2025 and has now started her work in the compliance committee of the Stockholm Convention on POPs.





Jimena Nieto is a Colombian lawyer with a Master of Laws (LLM) in Public Environmental Law from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Ms. Nieto has extensive experience related to the functioning of compliance committees in multilateral environmental agreements. She was part of the Colombian delegation during the negotiations that gave rise to the Stockholm Convention and played a decisive role in the adoption of Article 17. She also co-chaired the contact group on Article 15 of the Minamata Convention and the same article of the Paris Agreement, which establish the respective compliance mechanisms under those treaties.

Ms. Nieto is at present a member of the implementation and compliance committees of the Minamata Convention, the Rotterdam Convention, the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. She served as a member of the Basel Convention Implementation and Compliance Committee from 2012 to 2015 and again from 2019 to 2022. Jimena was also a member of the Cartagena Protocol Compliance Committee for 10 years until 2025.

Ms. Nieto was a public servant for over twenty-five years, working in the Colombian Ministry of the Environment and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. She is currently a professor of international environmental law in graduate programs at universities in Bogotá. She also works as a consultant on issues related to international environmental law and multilateral negotiations.