The Review of Compliance with the Aarhus Convention of the European Union

Abstract

There is, today, a growing complexity of regulatory regimes applicable throughout Europe. This chapter analyzes the complex (or triangular) relation that is established between global law, EU law and national law in the field of environmental law, more concretely, in the case of the Aarhus Convention. As both the EU and its Member States are bound to the Aarhus Convention, the obligations established in the Convention and in EU Law are interlinked. For instance, the duty of implementation of the Convention by the EU’s institutions and by the Member States, originates in global law as well as in EU law, which has consequences in case of non-compliance. In fact, the Aarhus Convention has a compliance mechanism, which can be applied to the EU’s Member States and to the EU itself – and EU law also has mechanisms to review compliance of its institutions and of Member States. The relationship between these two mechanisms is also complex. The chapter also studies three concrete cases of review of compliance by the EU to the Convention, by the Compliance Committee, and explores the foreseeable impact of the procedure to review compliance of the EU to the Aarhus Convention.