Browsing by Subject "Aarhus Convention"

Policies and regulations are increasingly enacted in the EU as well as the Member States to combat climate change. As the actions taken by the regulators necessarily have vast impacts, legitimacy of the climate actions should be ensured. The Aarhus Convention is an international agreement created precisely for ensuring the inclusion and judicial protection of peoples in environmental matters. As a dual agreement it binds the EU as well as the Member States, and the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has embraced open legal question related to the Aarhus Conventions’ impact in relation to EU policies and legislation. This thesis examines how the CJEU has interpreted the Aarhus obligations for EU institutions and for Member States. More specifically the aim is to gain empirical evidence on whether the obligations are given the same weight for both levels of the Union legal order. To examine this, the thesis engages with empirical case-law analysis of the CJEU judgments which mention the Aarhus Convention. The case-law analysis shows that there is a tendency for the CJEU to interpret the obligations relevant to the Convention restrictively for EU institutions and broadly for the Member States. It reaches to these conclusions largely through restrictive literal interpretation for the obligations for EU institutions, and teleological interpretation for the obligation for Member States. The findings illustrate that the EU as a party to an international agreement takes a role as a ‘guardian’ to make sure that the obligations are followed on the Member State level but prefers to refrain from the influence of the obligations for the institutions. The responsibility for legitimate environmental governance seems thus be spilled to the Member States.