Abstract

The Access to Court for Environmental Organisations under the Impact of Public International Law and European Union Law

The Aarhus Convention requires its parties, among them the EU and almost all of its Member States, to facilitate access to justice for NGOs promoting environmental protection. However, both the conditions under German law for bringing a claim to the German administrative courts and the prerequisites under primary EU law for taking a case to the Union judicature fall short of this requirement. This is all the more astonishing since the CJEU is traditionally perceived as being more prone to admitting individual claims than the German jurisprudence. The current article seeks to explore the background of the access deficits established for the respective legal order. In the EU part, it offers for the first time a comprehensive analysis of the effects, with respect of NGOs promoting environmental protection, of the widening of direct access to Union courts for natural and legal persons brought about by the Treaty of Lisbon.