Greece has been suspended from U.N. carbon trading in an unprecedented punishment for violating greenhouse gas reporting rules that underpin a fight against global warming, officials said on Tuesday.

A group of legal experts enforcing compliance with the U.N.’s Kyoto Protocol also said it was opening proceedings against Canada for alleged violations of rules on accounting for heat-trapping gases.

“Greece is declared to be in non-compliance,” the enforcement branch said in a statement distributed by the Bonn-based U.N. Climate Change Secretariat, the first such ruling since Kyoto entered into force in 2005.

Athens had failed to maintain a proper national system for recording greenhouse gas emissions, key to ensuring compliance with the Protocol seeking to slow temperature rises that could bring more floods, droughts, heatwaves and rising seas.

“Greece is not eligible to participate in the (trading) mechanisms…of the protocol pending the resolution of the question of implementation,” the enforcement branch said of a finding, formally confirmed last week.

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