The Paris Agreement's Compliance Committee Is Non-Punitive by Treaty Design — and in 2025 It Opened Consideration of 171 Parties at Once

by Arjun Mehta · September 11, 2026

Science & Technology Writer, The Globe Ledger

At its thirteenth meeting, held from 1 to 4 April 2025, a twelve-seat expert body constituted under the Paris Agreement worked through a list of governments and recorded that 171 Parties had not communicated a nationally determined contribution. It then took the step its own rules provide for: in the words of its annual report, it "decided to initiate consideration of issues with respect to those Parties under paragraph 22(a)(i)". No fine followed. No suspension followed. Notifications followed.

The body is the Paris Agreement Implementation and Compliance Committee, and the reason its strongest move is a notification is written into the treaty that created it. Article 15, paragraph 1 of the Paris Agreement states that "A mechanism to facilitate implementation of and promote compliance with the provisions of this Agreement is hereby established." Paragraph 2 then defines the shape of that mechanism in a single sentence that has done more to determine the committee's behaviour than any subsequent decision: the mechanism "shall consist of a committee that shall be expert-based and facilitative in nature and function in a manner that is transparent, non-adversarial and non-punitive. The committee shall pay particular attention to the respective national capabilities and circumstances of Parties." The article does not use the word punishment, and it does not name a penalty it withholds. It prescribes the character of the body, and every power the committee has was written to fit that character.

Paragraph 3 sends the detail elsewhere, providing that the committee operates under modalities and procedures adopted by the Agreement's governing meeting — the CMA — at its first session, and reports to that meeting annually. Those modalities were adopted at Katowice as decision 20/CMA.1, at the twenty-sixth plenary meeting on 15 December 2018. Rules of procedure took four more years, arriving as decision 24/CMA.4 in 2022. The UNFCCC secretariat's own description of the committee restates the design in blunter language than the treaty uses: the committee is "non-adversarial, non-punitive and transparent", and "It will not settle disputes or impose penalties."

Dispute settlement, in the Paris system, lives somewhere else entirely. Article 24 provides that "The provisions of Article 14 of the Convention on settlement of disputes shall apply mutatis mutandis to this Agreement." Article 14 of the 1992 Framework Convention opens arbitration and the International Court of Justice to states that have separately declared they accept one or the other, and leaves conciliation as the residual route where no such declaration is in force. The compliance committee is not a lesser version of that route. It is a different instrument for a different purpose.

It is also not the body the climate regime built the previous time. The Kyoto Protocol's compliance committee was split in two: a facilitative branch that advises and assists, and an enforcement branch that determines whether Annex I Parties have met their emission targets, the methodological and reporting requirements for their inventories, and the eligibility requirements for the Protocol's mechanisms. Where a Party exceeded its assigned amount, the enforcement branch was to declare it in non-compliance, require the excess to be made good in the next commitment period with an additional deduction of 30 per cent, require a compliance action plan, and suspend the Party's eligibility to make transfers under emissions trading. The Paris committee has one branch and none of those consequences. That is the contrast the drafters chose, and Article 15 is where they wrote it down.

What can put a country in front of the committee is narrower than the phrase "compliance committee" suggests, though not quite as narrow as a filing check. Most of the triggers the secretariat lists, and the ones the committee's 2025 report shows it using at scale, turn on a document that has not arrived: a Party that has not communicated or maintained a nationally determined contribution as required by Article 4; a Party that has not submitted the reports required by Article 13, paragraph 7 — a national inventory report of anthropogenic emissions by sources and removals by sinks, and the information necessary to track progress in implementing and achieving its contribution — or the support information required of developed countries under Article 13, paragraph 9 and Article 9, paragraph 7; and a Party that has not participated in the facilitative multilateral consideration of progress. A Party may also refer itself, on any provision. One trigger does reach the content of what was filed rather than its existence: the committee may take up "significant and persistent inconsistencies" in a Party's reported information, based on the recommendations in a technical expert review report — but only, on the secretariat's description of the mechanism, with the consent of the Party concerned. What no trigger asks is whether a target is ambitious enough, or whether emissions are actually falling.

The 2025 figures show the machinery running at scale. The committee's annual report to the CMA, issued on 6 November 2025 as FCCC/PA/CMA/2025/9 and covering 12 September 2024 to 2 October 2025, records that six Parties communicated their contributions after the 10 February 2025 due date but before the April meeting ended, and that the committee "decided not to initiate consideration of issues with respect to those Parties". For the 171 that had communicated nothing, it opened consideration under paragraph 22(a)(i) of its modalities. By the close of its fourteenth meeting, held from 15 to 18 July, eight more had filed and the figure stood at 163; by the close of its fifteenth, held from 29 September to 2 October 2025, a further 33 had filed and it stood at 130.

The reporting side of the ledger is smaller and more stubborn. The same report records 37 Parties that had not submitted one or more of the mandatory reports and communications under the enhanced transparency framework — 30 missing a national inventory report under Article 13, paragraph 7(a), 33 missing the information needed to track progress on their contribution under paragraph 7(b), and two developed country Parties missing information on the support they had provided. Four more filed by the close of the fourteenth meeting, bringing the number to 33, and five more by the close of the fifteenth, bringing it to 28. Separately, the committee initiated consideration of 11 final technical expert review reports prepared under Article 13, paragraphs 11 and 12, and held initial discussions on possible significant and persistent inconsistencies — the one part of its 2025 docket where the substance of what a Party reported, rather than whether it reported at all, was in issue.

What the committee did with those files is the part that explains the institution. It notified the Parties concerned of its decisions. It held virtual consultations with four of them about the obstacles they faced, with finance, technology and capacity-building bodies joining where asked. It requested the secretariat to prepare an initial mapping of the resources available, and then built on that mapping itself: a "Guide to provide orientation on resources available to Parties to support the preparation of NDCs and BTRs", version 1.0, issued in August 2026 as PAICC/2026/M17/4, which sets out where support can be found and restates the deadlines — 31 December 2024 for the first biennial transparency reports, 31 December 2026 for the second. The committee's menu of measures, as the secretariat describes it, runs to dialogue, help in engaging with finance, technology and capacity-building bodies, recommendations, assistance in developing an action plan, and — where a Party has not met one of the specified mandatory requirements — findings of fact. A finding of fact recorded in a public report is the far end of the scale.

The internal machinery is correspondingly modest. Under the rules of procedure the committee "shall meet at least twice every year", elects from among its members "one Co-Chair from a developed country Party and one Co-Chair from a developing country Party", works by consensus, and falls back, only after efforts at consensus are exhausted, on a vote in which "A decision that is voted in favour of by at least three quarters of members present and voting shall be considered adopted." Members and alternates serve terms beginning on 1 January of the calendar year immediately following their election, and are bound to "preserve the confidentiality of information received in confidence".

Seats go unfilled. The committee is twelve members strong — two from each of the five United Nations regional groups and one each for the least developed countries and small island developing States, with alternates alongside them — and the annex to the 2025 annual report records two seats vacant with nominations still outstanding. Among the four matters the committee asked the CMA to take note of were "the urgent need for regional groups and constituencies to submit their outstanding nominations for seats on the Committee" and the need for the secretariat's legal affairs division to be fully resourced through the core budget. A compliance body that cannot fill its own bench is making a point about the system it sits in.

The committee does have one instrument aimed at patterns rather than individual Parties: paragraph 32 of its modalities lets it identify issues of a systemic nature. It has been circling that power for two years. Its report records that it "noted with concern the large number of Parties that had not communicated an NDC as at 2 October 2025" and "the significant number of Parties that had not submitted mandatory reports and information under the ETF"; that "Some Committee members noted that the setting by the CMA of a clear and explicit submission deadline for the next round of NDCs, as well as the effective communication of that deadline to Parties and the public, is of critical importance"; and that the committee "agreed to continue to discuss whether the matters referred to in paragraphs 69–70 above relate to issues of a systemic nature". It also "noted with concern that over 45 Parties had not provided it with any information relating to the consideration of issues" — governments that did not answer at all. The most aggressive act available against a global pattern of non-filing is to describe it accurately to the assembled Parties.

Whether that is enough is genuinely contested, and the dispute does not divide neatly. One view, held among many developing-country delegations and by defenders of the Katowice outcome, is that the non-punitive design is precisely why near-universal membership exists at all, and that most missing documents reflect capacity rather than defiance — which is why the committee's output is a resource guide rather than a docket. The opposing view, argued in a substantial body of international-law scholarship, is that a mechanism that can neither compel nor sanction is not a compliance mechanism in any ordinary sense, and that calling it one obscures how little the Agreement can demand. Nothing in the treaty text settles which is right, and this article does not.

What the record does show is narrower than either claim. Between April and October 2025 the number of Parties with no communicated contribution fell from 171 to 130 while the committee was notifying them, and the committee's own report does not assert that the notifications caused the filings. It is an expert body, meeting at least twice a year, that counts what has not arrived, tells governments it has noticed, offers to help, and publishes the total. Article 15 asked for nothing more, and by the terms it set for the committee's own conduct, it rules out anything punitive.