Individual rights and collective interests in EU law: Three approaches to a still volatile relationship

Abstract

The protection of collective interests is a topical issue in EU law. A significant challenge arises from the fact that EU law traditionally connects rights and interests at an individual, rather than a collective level. This article explores three areas of EU law (environmental law, consumer law, and access to documents), which reveal three different approaches to collective interests. In order to foster the development of a coherent framework for protecting collective interests, the suggestion is made to maintain the classic mechanism according to which broadly conceived individual interests function as triggers for individual rights, and to complement this with mechanisms allowing collective interests also to activate the enforcement of such rights.