Justice and Environment

Aarhus

The Aarhus Convention is based on three ‘pillars’: access to information, public participation and access to justice. It guarantees the public rights to know what is going on in their environment, participate in decisions about their surroundings and to seek redress and review by the courts if those rights are not met.

The EU is a signatory to the Aarhus Convention: it applies throughout the EU. J&E member organisations analysing national legislation and cases in Austria, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Slovakia and Slovenia found numerous gaps in the countries’ transposition and implementation of the Aarhus Convention, in particular in relation to access to justice. “The problems are astonishingly similar in most of our countries,” concludes J&E Aarhus Coordinator Dana Marekova in a position paper summarising the findings. Broader engagement of the public into environmental decision making is vital for improving the quality of the places we inhabit and the life we live. To achieve this the deficiencies in the transposition and implementation of the Aarhus convention need to be eliminated. Given the importance of access to justice, the Aarhus Convention has been the primary focus of J&E’s work since 2006 and 2007, supported by the European Commission’s Environment Directorate-General and the Visegrad Fund. J&E found that, in some or all of the investigated Member States:

There is insufficient clarity on the position of the AC in the national legal systems, particularly as to its direct applicability and precedence over national law in practice;
Legal standing both in administrative and judicial proceedings is a problem, especially the position of organisations and individuals, where for the most part only the standing of environmental organisations in proceedings under Article 9.2 is unproblematic;
Efficiency of the review of the timeliness of proceedings is an issue, and injunctive relief or other forms of postponing challenged decisions are scarce;
Review of decisions within the EIA process needs to be addressed and in particular screening decisions, since many assessments end at this stage and national systems make it often impossible to challenge these decisions.

J&E offers several recommendations for closing these gaps. In most cases, many of the shortcomings in the national legal systems can be resolved if existing provisions are interpreted and applied in compatibility with the letter – and mainly with the spirit – of the Convention. If the Access to Justice Directive is to be positive, the criteria for recognition of qualified entities should be rephrased so as the adoption of the Directive will not result in the restriction of currently prevailing rights in Member States.

J&E legal analyses, case studies and position papers on the Aarhus Convention are available here for downloading.

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2006 Aarhus Case study collection