Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-03-30-Speech-2-277"
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"en.20040330.11.2-277"2
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".
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, Commissioner Wallström is wrong to say that she is implementing the Århus Convention; the reality of it is that her draft directive on access to courts goes much further than does Århus.
Århus merely requires open access to administrative or, alternatively, judicial review proceedings; Commissioner Wallström seeks to lay down binding provisions on access to the courts in all the Member States, with all environmental organisations to be empowered to object to administrative decisions and to appeal against them, with provision also for interim legal protection. This is to apply to the whole body of environmental law, in other words, to the whole
defined in the Community as having to do with the protection or improvement of the environment, including human health and the protection or rational use of natural resources. The examples listed are, among others, water protection, noise protection, soil protection, atmospheric pollution, town and country planning, and biotechnologies. Environmental organisations are thus given a general right to contest and monitor the application of the law. That amounts to nothing more and nothing less than a system change in the implementation and control of the law as it stands in most of Europe’s Member States, with private bodies, in their guise as representatives of the public, being given the right to supervise the authorities.
Our legal system knows nothing of the monitoring of law by any such body separate from the courts and from the competent authorities, and with good reason. Environmental associations are, at the end of the day, interest groups like any others, lacking democratic legitimacy and not bound by law and statute. Introducing and making binding such a dramatic extension of class action will have a massive effect on the economy and cannot under any circumstances be reconciled with the Lisbon objectives. It is for that reason that the Committee on Citizens’ Freedoms and Rights, Justice and Home Affairs has limited itself to saying that Århus must be implemented, but to a minimum standard, and if Member States want to go beyond that, then that is their decision. That is where the matter should rest, and so I can only hope, Commissioner Wallström, that the Council will firmly put a stop to your initiative."@en1
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