EEB

Enforcement

What is the EU doing?

• What is the EU doing?
• What is the EEB doing?
• Minimum Criteria for Environmental Inspections
• Implementing European Community Environmental Law
• Environmental Liability

On its website  the Commission says: “Whatever the means used, the overall objective of the Commission is to ensure that EU environmental legislation is implemented in full, correctly and on time.”

As it does not have its own inspectorate for non-compliance cases, the Commission relies to a large extent to actions and complaints from citizens' organisations and individual citizens – particularly so in the environmental field. However, it is not involving those citizens in the process of checking complaints. It has even been known to withhold essential information from citizens in such cases.

Environmental citizens’ organisations continue to be denied access to the European Court of Justice - as required by the Aarhus Convention. Also, the current review process of the EU Regulation on Access to the Commission has tried to limit existing rights to documents.

However, access to information and conditions for public participation are improving - as are the legal tools being developed to improve enforcement. But in the EEB’s views the efforts are not sufficient. In November 2008 the long awaited Communication on implementing EU Environmental Law was published – which the EEB welcomed as an excellent proposal. For our comments on this please see Implementing European Community Environmental Law.

Over the past years the Community has adopted two directives the EEB welcomed as tools for prevention and better enforcement. After an extremely long legislative process in 2004 it adopted the Directive on environmental liability and in 2008 the Directive on the Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law.

Another important directive which created high expectations for improved environment protection was the 1985 Directive on Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and its subsequent revisions. Due to many weak or partly faulty EIAs the directive led to new complaints rather than reducing their number.

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