The Rights of Access to Justice in Environmental Matters in the EU – The Third Pillar of the Aarhus Convention

Аннотация

The UNECE Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in DecisionMaking and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters, signed at Aarhus in 1998, has strengthened the rights of the public to receive information and to request review of acts in the field of the environment. It is laid down in the third pillar of the Convention that members of the public shall have access to administrative or judicial procedures to challenge measures by public authorities that contravene provisions of environmental law. Environmental law is understood to include legislation protecting human health insofar as it is potentially affected by environmental elements. This means that acts or omissions in the area of food law may be challenged under the specific review procedures, in particular if the contamination of the food chain is concerned. The scope and limits of such rights to request review is the subject matter of appeals lodged by several EU institutions with the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). They are related to the establishment of EU maximum residue levels of pesticides in or on food and feed.This article analyses this case as well as the underlying questions of law. In essence, the questions are whether the EU legislator was entitled to limit the review procedure under the EU legislation to the review of administrative acts and which measures qualify for administrative acts under the EU Aarhus legislation.