Access to Environmental Justice and European Union Institutional Compliance With the Aarhus Convention: A Rather Longer and More Winding Road than Anticipated

The aim of this article is to track through and offer some reflections on the efforts by the European Union (EU) to ensure that EU law adequately implements the access to environmental justice obligations set down in the 1998 Aarhus Convention (AC) with respect to activities carried out by its supranational institutions and other Union bodies. For a number of years the EU has struggled to ensure its legal framework is in conformity with the Convention’s requirements concerning access to justice, not least in the wake of adverse findings expressed by the Convention’s Compliance Committee responding to complaints from members of the public. However, matters appear to have improved significantly in October 2021 with the adoption of EU Regulation 2021/1767 amending the Union’s legislative rules on an internal review mechanism of EU administrative acts or omissions alleged by members of the public to contravene EU environmental law (namely the ‘Aarhus Regulation’ 1367/2006). Whilst this article considers that most of the key issues relating to noncompliance have now been addressed satisfactorily, much of the credit for this ultimately lies with the European Parliament and Council of the EU as primary co-legislators rather than other key Union institutional actors such as the European Commission or the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU). At the same time, this recent legislative innovation has not enabled the EU to reach its destination of achieving full compliance with the Convention over access to environmental justice, with some important administrative activities affecting the environment still remaining exempt from the Union’s internal review system such as EU decisions on state aid.