Judicial cooperation in environmental matters

Abstract

The need to ensure a uniform interpretation and effective application of the large corpus of EU environmental regulation in the jurisdictions of the Member States remains a task of pivotal importance for the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU). A quick look at the CURIA database reveals that many judgments are handed down every year to clarify the meaning of EU environmental provisions. It is therefore important to study the proper functioning of the tandem composed of the CJEU and the national courts in this field of EU law. In that sense, this article responds to Bogojević’s call ‘to draw a grander map of judicial dialogues initiated across various Member States’. More specifically, the topic investigated by this article is how the United Kingdom (UK) courts have followed up on responses received from the CJEU to their preliminary reference requests in the field of EU environmental law, from the UK’s accession in 1972 until January 2017. All the cases we have retrieved from the UK show various degrees of willingness to cooperate with the CJEU. This article highlights the existence of three trends: full cooperation, fragmented cooperation and presumed cooperation.