Justice and EnvironmentNews
2010-05-25 / Report on Access to Justice in Environmental Matters
A new Report on Access to Justice in Environmental Matters is based on experiences with practical application of Article 9 of the Aarhus Convention in ten European countries (nine of them being the EU Members).
The Report discuses several specific topics from this field, which can be considered as crucial in relation to the practice of legal protection of the environment, namely
- terms for access to justice by individual members of public (“standing conditions”),
- scope of the court review of acts and omissions, related to the environment
- effectiveness of a court review, particularly its timeliness.
In relation to this, several more general subjects are discussed, e.g. the matter of direct application of the Convention by courts and the implementation of the Convention on the EU level and by the EU bodies. The most important overall aspect, which this study reflects on, is the disunity of the application of access to justice provisions of the Convention requirements by its individual Parties (mostly the EU Member States).