Source: https://iclg.com/practice-areas/environment-and-climate-change-laws-and-regulations/2-the-courts-as-guardians-of-the-environment-new-developments-in-access-to-justice-and-environmental-litigation
Timestamp: 2019-04-22 10:46:47+00:00

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Around the globe, and in Europe in particular, we are witnessing a dynamic development towards wider judicial protection of environmental laws and resources. Whereas in the past court review was mostly confined to vested individual interests and matters of subjective concern, we now see a continuing trend towards public interest litigation and judicial enforcement – including that of merely “objective” environmental laws – with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) playing an ever stronger role as litigators and trustees of the environment. This development comes as a reaction to the fact that most of the important global and collective environmental “goods” – such as a stable climate, biodiversity, genetic resources, water quality and ambient air quality – are increasingly being jeopardised and, at the same time, particularly prone to a deficit and disregard for enforcement. The extension of judicial control to objective environmental law and the widening of court access – especially to NGOs – can thus be deemed a key factor for the effective protection of collective environmental goods and the respective environmental laws. To date, these developments are still progressing, with a lot of open questions as to how far they will go and what consequences they entail for developers, investors, litigators, NGOs, administrations and judges.
This contribution provides an overview of the state of play, chiefly from a European perspective. Europe has positioned itself as a frontrunner in terms of procedural environmental rights through the adoption of the so-called Aarhus Convention (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters). This Convention was adopted as early as 1998 and entered into force in October 2001. The Convention has a compliance mechanism which has some distinctive features differentiating it from the compliance mechanisms of other international environmental agreements. The Compliance Committee is composed of independent experts serving in a personal capacity and the procedure can, and usually is, triggered by communications from the public. Although it is not a court, its opinions provide an authoritative interpretation of the provisions of the Convention.
The process of developing access to environmental justice is still ongoing and far from being completed, as explained in section 1 below, where we also provide some insight into global development beyond the Aarhus process. In the second section we look at the state of affairs in the EU, where the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has strongly moved to open its doors in the light of the Aarhus Convention. Thirdly, we take a look at the recent surge in environmental litigation and at attempts in specific case law to refer States and polluters to court for breach of environmental responsibilities.
The need for legal guarantees of public involvement is increasingly being reflected in international environmental law and in the number of instruments adopted after 1990 which have mentioned the necessity of assuring access to information and public participation in environmental decision-making. The key role in this respect has no doubt been played by Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration.
Although the Rio Declaration belongs to the instruments of so-called “soft law” (i.e. having no binding legal force but merely constituting recommendations or political declarations), Principle 10 is commonly considered to be significant as a clear global expression of the developing concepts of the role of the public in relation to the environment. Soon after its adoption, it was acknowledged as an international benchmark against which the compatibility of national standards could be compared, and as a forecast of the creation of new procedural rights which could be granted to individuals through international law and exercised at the national and possibly international level.
Contrary to access to information and public participation, as far as global treaty regimes are concerned, the strongest support for access to justice in environmental matters was, for a long time, to be found in human rights regimes rather than in multilateral environmental agreements. Thus, access to justice in environmental matters was traced back to such generally recognised principles as the right to be heard and to appeal decisions, as is guaranteed by human rights conventions. The developments in national legislation were not immediately followed at the international level and access to environmental justice – as compared to public participation and access to information – was relatively rarely addressed in international environmental law outside the context of liability regimes and assuring equivalent access to justice in the transboundary context.
The third pillar of the Aarhus Convention appears to be the most under-developed in terms of the clarity and precision of the legal scheme envisaged therein. This stems largely from the fact that – as opposed to the two other pillars of the Convention – it covers an area in which very few prior provisions existed to address environment-specific issues, within a plethora of diverse and longstanding traditional approaches in domestic legislation concerning general access to justice. This pillar was thus effectively constructed on the spot (i.e. during the negotiations) out of scarce, fragmented elements and amid intense debates reflecting totally opposite views as to its content, scope and legal nature. The eventual construction of this pillar, in particular of paragraphs 2 and 3 of Article 9, provides a basis for many interpretations which increasingly interfere with the traditional approaches used in the respective legislation of almost all parties. This has resulted in an increasing number of legal disputes concerning the way this pillar is implemented, both at the national and at the EU level.
■ review procedures for public review of acts and omissions of private persons or public authorities concerning national law relating to the environment (Article 9.3).
Moreover, Article 9.4 obliges parties to the Convention to provide, within the review procedures, for adequate and effective remedies, including injunctive relief. Furthermore, the procedures shall be fair, equitable, timely and not prohibitively expensive.
Article 9.5 regulates practicalities, such as the obligation to provide the public with sufficient information on access to administrative and judicial review procedures.
The cases in front of the Aarhus Compliance Committee showed a number of problems, in particular with regard to standing for NGOs and the scope of review in countries which have a system of judicial review based on infringements of rights (for example, cases ACC/31/Germany, ACC/48/Austria or ACC/50/Czech Republic). In some instances, the respective requirements of the Aarhus Convention seem to call for fundamental changes of certain well-established arrangements concerning standing. In countries with a common law system (i.e. the UK and Ireland), the biggest challenge seems to be related to the issue of costs, in particular related to the obligation to pay the costs of the winning party. Quite common in many countries are prolonged judicial procedures which do not meet the requirement of timeliness. Other problems relate to minimum standards applicable to access-to-justice procedures and remedies in Article 9, paragraph 4, of the Convention, including fair and equitable procedures, injunctive relief and costs.
The Bali Guidelines include a number of provisions (Guidelines 15–26) related to access to environmental justice. They are very similar to the above-described provisions of Article 9 of the Aarhus Convention and include all the respective elements of access to the environmental justice legal framework. They are, however, only guidelines and have no binding legal force.
It must be noted that there is no consensus in the international community that human rights obligations specific to the environment have been established in any globally applicable, binding instrument or as a matter of customary international law. In other regions, however, there are some initiatives aimed at following the example of UNECE and developing their own legal instruments to implement Principle 10.
Recently (in March 2018), the Regional Agreement on Access to Information, Public Participation and Justice in Environmental Matters in Latin America and the Caribbean (the Escazú Agreement) was adopted. The Agreement has not yet entered into force but most of the LAC countries have moved quickly to ratify it. Compared to the Aarhus Convention, the Escazú Agreement provides much more specific norms of considerable importance for public interest litigation in relation to environmental issues (for example, a dynamic burden of proof and clear reference to the precautionary principle). Without any detailed analysis, it may be noted that while the Aarhus Convention provides generally clear, legally binding international norms, the provisions of the Escazú Agreement, especially those related to access to justice, leave a large measure of discretion to the State Parties concerning their implementation.
In the European Union, the Arhus Convention has triggered far-reaching advancements towards wider access to justice – particularly as regards environmental NGOs (ENGOs). On the side of the Community, the Convention was essentially transposed through Directive 2003/35 amending Directive 87/337/EEC on the assessment of the effects of certain public and private projects on the environment. According to that amendment to the EIA Directive (now codified as Directive 2011/92/EU), Member States are obliged to ensure “that in accordance with the relevant national legal system, members of the public concerned (a) having a sufficient interest, or alternatively (b) maintaining the impairment of a right, where administrative procedural law of a Member State requires this as a precondition, have access to a review procedure before a court (…) to challenge the substantive or procedural legality of decisions, acts or omissions subject to the public participation provisions of this Directive”. Moreover, it is provided that “what constitutes a sufficient interest and impairment of a right shall be determined by the Member States, consistently with the objective of giving the public concerned wide access to justice” and “to that end, the interest of any non-governmental organization meeting the requirements referred to in Article 1(2) shall be deemed sufficient for the purpose of point (a)” and furthermore “such Organizations shall also be deemed to have rights capable of being impaired for the purpose of point (b)”. A similar provision was also included in the Industrial Emission Directive 2010/75/EU (IE Directive) extending the above-referenced access to justice to permit decisions covered by this Directive.
When these provisions were adopted in 2003, they met with considerable reluctance among national governments and courts to give the public concerned wide access to justice. Most States, instead, tried to maintain their traditional limitations on public interest litigation as far as – seemingly – possible by proclaiming a very narrow interpretation. Of course, this was not accepted by the NGOs, and as a consequence, it was eventually in the hands of the CJEU to clarify the intention of both the Convention and the implementing norms of the EIA Directive. It is not a coincidence that most of the leading cases in this matter have been raised in Germany. The country is widely known for its strong traditional bias against public interest litigation and a stringent observance of the so-called “Schutznormtheorie” (protective norm approach), according to which standing is only granted to applicants who can reasonably claim the violation of a law that is protecting their individual interest. With its reluctance to overcome this “subservient” tradition on the one hand and its active environmental NGOs (ENGOs) and judiciary on the other, Germany has indeed served as a major instigator of a remarkable yet continuing series of leading cases by which the CJEU has rejected almost all essential containments the country has tried to uphold against NGO action and public interest litigation.
The first of these landmark decisions concerned the applicability of the protective rights doctrine to ENGO action. As a first attempt to transpose Directive 2003/35, Germany adopted in 2006 its first edition of a “Law on actions in environmental matters” (Umweltrechtsbehelfsgesetz). With this Act, NGO action was introduced with regard to all permit decisions subject to environmental impact assessment as demanded by the Directive. However, far-reaching restrictions on standing and scope of review were maintained and, most notably, this included the subjective rights doctrine. This means that NGOs could effectively only bring an action if – and as far as – individual rights are affected, and they were not permitted standing with regard to “objective” environmental laws. ENGOs had to wait until 2011 for this fundamental restriction to be turned down by the CJEU in its famous Trianel judgment (C-115/09). The German law needed to be revised accordingly – but, again, major restrictions on ENGOs’ court access continued. Two years later, the CJEU had to clarify in Altrip (C-72/11) that Germany could not limit standing on EIA issues to cases in which no environmental impact assessment was carried out at all, while not extending it to cases in which such an assessment was carried out but was irregular. As to the consequences of such procedural defects, the Court declared, however, that the national court may uphold the administrative decision if it is conceivable, having regard to the circumstances of the case, that the contested decision would not have been different without the procedural defect invoked by the applicant.
By that time, the EU Commission had also filed an infringement procedure against Germany. In addition to the points decided in Trianel and Altrip, the Commission turned against another important and long-standing national restriction to access to justice, the so-called “preclusion” rules. These regulations restrict the right to bring action, and also the scope of the court review, to only those objections that were already raised within the time limit set during the administrative procedure which led to the adoption of the contested decision. Since the time limit for raising objectives in the administrative procedure is rather short in Germany (usually four weeks from the publication of the project plans), this preclusion rule often strongly limits the possibilities of ENGOs to thoroughly assess the environmental impacts and legality of a permit decision, and it thus posed a great practical barrier to effective judicial review. In its ruling in this case (C-137/14 of 15 October 2015), the Court followed the Commission’s complaint and held that the German preclusion rules are not compatible with Article 11 of the EIA Directive and Article 25 of the IE Directive – yet another victory for access to justice and public interest litigation.
Another ground-breaking victory for ENGO action was celebrated in the famous case of the Slovakian Brown Bear (C-240/09). In this case, the court was asked if Member States were to grant NGOs standing also with regard to decisions that are not subject to environmental impact assessment – such as those regarding species protection under the EU Habitat Directive – and thus not covered by the above-mentioned European norms on NGO action. In its ruling, the CJEU clarified that these EIA-related EU norms transpose the Aarhus Convention only partially, and that it remains the responsibility of the Member States to implement the Convention in other fields of environmental decision-making through national legislation. Moreover, the Court indicated that all EU environmental laws must be applied in conformity with the Aarhus Convention. With regard to Article 9(3) of the Convention, this implies, according to the court, an obligation of the national courts to interpret the national procedural rules, as far as possible, in a way that allows NGOs standing with regard to all (national) environmental norms flowing from European law. However, the CJEU did not go further to conclude that conflicting national procedural laws are effectively overruled by EU law and thus to be waived by the national courts if they find no room for compliant interpretation. To that extent, the court left the interpretation of Article 9(3) to the discretion of the Member States.
This “last resort” of the national legislators was eventually conquered in the latest path-breaking CJEU judgment on environmental standing, which was handed down in the Austrian Protect Case in December 2017. In this case, the referring Austrian Court had asked the CJEU whether it follows from its previous adjudication that NGOs must be able to contest before a court a decision granting a permit for a water use that may be contrary to the obligation to prevent the deterioration of the status of bodies of water as set out in Article 4 of the EU’s Water Framework Directive. Again, this concerns a decision outside the scope of the EIA and IE Directives, i.e. the areas where EU law explicitly provides court access to ENGOs. In its judgment, the deciding Chamber gave up the cautious position of the Brown Bear judgment, and eventually attributed direct effect to its wide interpretation of Article 9(3) of the Aarhus Convention as a measure for access to justice in relation to the (implementation of) EU environmental law. The Court based this result on the fundamental right to judicial protection as provided in Article 47 of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. It found that this – directly applicable – right was breached by any national procedural law that hinders adequate implementation of Article 9(3) of the Aarhus Convention. What remains unclear, however, is whether the wider standing derived from the court’s interpretation is strictly limited to ENGOs or whether and to what extent it must also be applied to individual “members of the public concerned” in the meaning of Article 9(3) and 2(5) of the Aarhus Convention. The judgment does not explicitly address this question but it contains some indications that the court may well include qualified individuals in the scope of this Article.
With this question, amongst others, the play will now go back to Germany, as in April 2018 the German Federal Administrative Court referred several questions to the ECJ regarding, in particular, the implications of the above Protect judgment. The underlying case concerned, again, the implementation of water quality standards under EU water law. The German Court asked, i.a., whether not only ENGOs but individuals, too, must be able to instigate judicial review with regard to the implementation of these water quality standards despite the fact that they do not protect individual interests. The German Court took the view that this is not the case and that both the Aarhus Convention and EU law do not preclude national legislators from confining individual standing to laws protecting individual interests and – respectively – to applicants who reasonably claim that such a norm was breached. Furthermore, the German Federal Administrative Court held that the courts may limit the scope of review to whether the contested decision is in compliance with the protective norm(s) on which the applicant’s standing is based, and that the judicial scrutiny does not need to extend to further applicable laws that merely serve the public interest.
It is now in the hands of the CJEU to take a (further) fundamental decision which goes to the heart of the national judicial systems: whether to establish in the entire EU a fully-fledged actio popularis with regard to all environmental laws, or to preserve the subjective rights approach with regard to individual applicants and confine the assertion of “objective” laws to ENGOs. It is self-evident that this decision is going to be of tremendous relevance for the national judicial systems, investors and relevant administrations, and – above all – for the effectiveness of environmental law.
Besides this, there are two further grand bastions of “judicial calm” that have not been taken by the Aarhus movement. The above openings for ENGO action and public interest litigation have, so far, only been discussed with regard to land-use related decisions and procedures. However, the principles established by the Aarhus Convention and CJEU jurisdiction are also applicable to the wide field of product- and substance-related regulation, including the various registration, certification and authorisation regimes. As a consequence, we should expect this field to become subject to NGO action as well. The second bastion concerns administrative acts of the EU itself, e.g. authorisation of pesticides and chemicals or genetically modified organism (GMO) products. In this regard, access to the General Court and the CJEU is strictly limited by Article 263(4) of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU) to applicants who are individually and directly concerned by the contested act. In a long line of judgments, the CJEU has always interpreted this provision very strictly and – according to its “Plaumann doctrine” – allowed standing only to applicants alleging a direct breach of their vested individual rights. It appears that this strict interpretation is not compatible with what the court has decided in the above-reported judgments. Consequently, the Plaumann doctrine is subject to growing criticism, and it has been impugned as incompatible with the Aarhus Convention by the Aarhus Compliance Committee. Only recently, the Plaumann doctrine has been challenged, again, by a complaint from several families who claim that insufficient and unlawful EU climate policies are jeopardising their fundamental rights to health and property, as further discussed in the next section.
While access to justice in environmental litigation in Europe is mostly linked to public law proceedings, private law proceedings can also play an important role. Arguably inspired by developments in the United States of America and Australia, climate change litigation in the EU is witnessing an increasing reliance on tort law.
The Urgenda case can be seen as the landmark case in this field. As this case has been extensively covered in academic literature, it needs little introduction here. In short, the The Hague District Court (the Netherlands) on 24 June 2015 upheld the claim of an NGO called Urgenda against the Dutch State and ordered the latter to take additional measures to ensure that the Netherlands will reach the target of lowering its greenhouse gas emissions by 25% by 2020 in comparison to its 1990 emissions (ECLI:NL:RBDHA:2015:7145). This judgment was confirmed in appeal on 9 October 2018 (ECLI:NL:GHDHA:2018:2591). Whether the judgment will also be confirmed in cassation remains to be seen.
The Urgenda case is facilitated by the fact that, under Dutch tort law, environmental organisations can bring proceedings to protect the interests of third parties, including future generations, under Article 3:305 a-b of the Dutch Civil Code. From a substantive perspective, this case rests on the claim that the Dutch State is breaching its duty of care to comply with the greenhouse gas emissions reduction target for the Netherlands associated with the international commitment made under the Paris Agreement to keep global warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, thereby impairing the right to life (Article 2, European Convention on Human Rights) and the right to respect for family and private life (Article 8, European Convention on Human Rights).
Whether from a substantive perspective this judgment will indeed lead to better performance by the Netherlands in the fight against climate change is unclear. Three years have passed since the date of the first degree judgment and no substantive melioration can be seen. The Dutch legislator is discussing the adoption of a Climate Act, but its content is programmatic in nature and hence it has yet to be translated into concrete actions and results. The Urgenda case certainly has strong symbolic value. It inspires NGOs to undertake similar actions at national level, as discussed in the next section, and at EU level, as discussed in the following section. Yet, it also has a negative connotation. It shows that public law is failing to address this major inter-generational challenge.
With the Urgenda case as a source of (legal) inspiration, other NGOs have started tort law-based proceedings to protect the environment in the Member States of the EU. With more cases pending or in preparation (for an overview see www.eufje.org), three cases reached a diametrically opposite outcome to the one seen in Urgenda, thereby highlighting the difficulties characterising tort law-based environmental litigation.
First of all, in the Netherlands, an environmental association called Milieudefensie initiated two actions based on tort law against the State for failure to protect human health at several locations. The argumentation scheme of the plaintiff in this case resembles that used in the Urgenda case in many aspects. This notwithstanding, despite it being undisputed that the Netherlands is not complying with EU standards on air quality, the The Hague District Court ruled in December 2017 that Milieudefensie did not provide enough evidence to support the claim that a specific damage was caused by the State’s failure to comply with air quality thresholds (ECLI:NL:RBDHA:2017:15380). It therefore dismissed the claim.
A different outcome might be obtained by a Peruvian farmer who brought a lawsuit before the Higher Regional Court of Essen, Germany (Landgericht Essen [Essen District Court], Lliuya v RWE AG, 15 December 2016 – No 2 O 285/15). In contrast to the Urgenda case, the Peruvian claimant targets a private party, the energy concern RWE. The claimant’s main argument is that RWE knowingly contributes to climate change, resulting in the melting of a glacier in Peru, which puts the claimant’s house at risk of flooding. As in the Milieudefensie case, the national court of first instance ruled against the claimant and held that the causal linkage between RWE’s greenhouse gas emissions and the damage threatening the claimant was not (sufficiently) proven. The importance of establishing a causal link was confirmed in appeal (Oberlandesgericht Hamm, 30.11.2017 – 5 U 15/17). However, the appeal court overruled the decision of the court of first instance and ordered the plaintiff to provide further evidence in order to sufficiently establish the alleged causal linkages. The case is still pending, and it remains to be seen whether the claimant is going to succeed.
Finally, in the Plan B case in the United Kingdom (Royal Courts of Justice, Plan B and Others v Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy,  EWHC 1892 (Admin)), still a Member State at the moment of writing this contribution, reliance on tort law to protect the environment was rejected. The main claim of the applicants was that the UK government should go beyond the targets stipulated under the Climate Change Act 2008 in order to meet its Paris Agreement target. The national court dismissed all grounds of appeal because, among other reasons, the executive has wide discretion to assess the advantages and disadvantages of any particular course of action and the statutory Climate Change Committee had advised that it is not yet necessary to amend the 80% target in force today.
In each of these cases, an appeal has been launched. Further developments are thus awaited. It is, in any case, already possible to recognise an initial trend. First of all, the legacy of Urgenda at national level has been quite unsuccessful so far. This picture, however, might be less negative than it appears at first glance. Indeed although, until Urgenda, the main hurdle for initiating this kind of case came from standing requirements, obstacles now come from other elements of the tort-law doctrine, such as causation and the burden of proof. The initial hurdle (standing) seems to have been overcome, at least in certain Member States. Accordingly, we can speak of a development in the judicial practice concerning this kind of action.
The Urgenda case has not only been a source of inspiration for proceedings at national level; it has also served as an example for starting proceedings at EU level. In May 2018, Mr. Carvalho and 36 other claimants lodged a case challenging the lawfulness of several legislative acts of the EU in the field of climate change, namely the 2018 amendments to the ETS Directive, the Effort Sharing Regulation, and the Land Use, Land-Use Change and Forestry (LULUCF) Regulation.
The relevance of the Urgenda case for these proceedings is evident in the two main pillars of this action. First, Carvalho and others rely on the provisions on non-contractual liability of the Union (Articles 268 and 340 TFEU) to seek an injunction requiring the Union to set deeper emissions reduction targets at the level required by international law. Second, and as indicated above, they rely on human rights in order to broaden the standing requirements in force under the action for annulment of binding EU acts (Article 263 TFEU).
Both pillars can, independently from one another, potentially revolutionise the field of environmental litigation at EU level. It is difficult to predict how the CJEU will rule on each of these pillars. The pillar based on non-contractual liability of the Union is a novelty in climate law, and, more generally, non-contractual liability is an action not extensively discussed in academic literature. The pillar based on the broad interpretation of the standing requirements under Article 263 TFEU will face the traditionally restrictive approach by the CJEU in this area, as discussed in section 2 above. Still, (environmental) lawyers have been putting pressure on the Court to change its approach for years. The possibility cannot be ruled out that the importance of climate change will make the Court change its approach, once and for all.
1. S. Kravchenko, ‘The Aarhus Convention and Innovations in Compliance with Multilateral Environmental Agreements Compliance Mechanisms’, Yearbook of European Environmental Law, Oxford University Press, Volume 7, 2007.
2. J. Wates, ‘The Aarhus Convention: a Driving Force for Environmental Democracy’, JEEPL, Volume 2, Number 1.
3. J. Ebbeson, ‘Public participation’, (in) The Oxford Handbook of International Environmental Law, D. Bodansky, J. Brunnee and E. Hey, Oxford University Press, 2007, p. 686.
4. S. Stec, ‘Developing standards for Procedural Environmental rights through Practice’, (in) Procedural Environmental Rights: Principle X in Theory and Pratice, J. Jendrośka and M. Bar (eds), European Environmental Law Series, Intersentia, p. 5.
This contribution is co-authored by Dr. Lorenzo Squintani, Assistant Professor and Senior Lecturer in European and Economic Law at the University of Groningen (the Netherlands) and member of the managing board of the European Environmental Law Forum.

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