This is an important judgment on governmental liability for a rather shabby retrospective change of the rules about subsidies for photovoltaic schemes. The Court of Appeal had decided in 2012 that the changes were unlawful: see judgment and my post. The question in Breyer was whether businesses could obtain damages under A1P1 arising out of […]
This Strasbourg decision is the end of a long saga. Our applicants Hardy and Maile lived near proposed Liquified Natural Gas terminals at Milford Haven. In 2003 and 2004, an oil refiner obtained various consents to enable the LNG to be imported, and the applicants challenged them in the domestic courts. But the image, and […]
Belgium and its airports seem to have been skirmishing with the European Union Courts for some time now. First, in 2008, the ECJ inAbraham decided that a major and well-established expansion of Liege-Bierset airport required Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), contrary to the contentions of the airport and its operators. Our case, Boxus, concerns a raft of challenges to consents for that airport […]
Case C-366/10 The Air Transport Association of America and Others, CJEU, 6 October 2011, Opinion of Advocate-General Kokott In a recent post on US climate change litigation, I said that, by contrast with the US Courts, there was relatively little such strategic litigation in the UK and the EU. But that all changes when the […]
In the UK and EU, there are a lot of statutes and rules about climate change, and relatively little strategic litigation. Hop over the Pond, and we see exactly the reverse, a reflection of different political dynamics with the hostility of the US Congress to climate change legislation. It is interesting to look at some […]
R (Infinis) v. Ofgem & Non-Fossil Purchasing Agency Limited, Interested Party [2011] EWHC 1873 (Admin) Lindblom J, 10 August 2011 Read judgment In a recent post, I suggested that successful claims under Article 1 Protocol 1 (the human right to peaceful enjoyment of property) faced all sorts of difficulties, hence the particular interest of that […]
A recent post from Begonia Filgueira celebrated the move by the Bolivian Parliament to accord rights in law to Nature. It rightly commanded considerable attention but not all readers were ecstatic. So when last week DEFRA came out with a rather different approach to valuing nature in its Natural Environment White Paper – the first […]
The ticklish question of how to come up with a cheap but effective form of environmental judicial review still has not been answered. One way talked about at a recent seminar on environmental tribunals (see John Jolliffe’s post of today) is to use the environmental part of the new tribunal system, and have judicial reviews heard […]
Various NGOs challenged the grant of permits to 3 new power stations in the Netherlands, because the state was exceeding its emission limits for sulphur dioxide (SO2) and nitrogen oxides (NOx) and the grant of permits would simply add to these exceedences. The case was referred to the CJEU. The Advocate-General thought that the exceedences were relevant to whether […]
