Sanja Bogojevic

EU Climate Change Litigation, the Role of the European Courts, and the Importance of Legal Culture

The purpose of this article is to show it is only in light of legal culture that climate change jurisprudence in the European Union can be explained. Examining the case law concerning the EU Emissions Trading Scheme, this article demonstrates that climate change proceedings in the European Union raise questions that stand at the heart of the EU legal order; that is, they demand that the boundaries of the EUs regulatory competences are drawn. In effect, the EU courts focus on ensuring that EU climate change laws are in accord with the rule of law or, in the context of EU law, the borders of the EUs environmental regulatory powers. As such, this article shows that attention needs to be given to the interaction between climate change laws and the constitutional role of the EU judiciary. These interactions are considered here together with the contingency of EU climate change litigation on EU legal culture.

EU Human Rights Law and Environmental Protection: The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship?

A sharp increase in the number of jurisdictions constitutionalising environmental rights has led to the assumption of a surfacing environmental rights revolution. The Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union (Charter) codifies a ‘high level of environmental protection’ and ‘improvement of the quality of the environment’ as part of EU’s corpus of fundamental rights protection, and as such, hints to the possibility of the EU following a similar constitutionalising trend. I investigate this possibility here by examining the type of legal duties embedded in the Charter’s environmental provisions, and their prospect of securing individual rights for the safeguard of the environment.

Europeanization of the Judiciary in Southeast Europe

With the creation of what today is the European Union (EU) began the practice of the ‘Europeanisation’ of laws in Europe. This signifies the processes of endorsing EU law and European integration by, inter alia, implementing the corpus of laws stemming from European law making, as well as adapting and training domestic official bodies to cooperate with EU-based institutions. This process was catalysed by the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU), which proclaimed EU law a ‘new legal order’, distinct from both national and international law, and having supremacy over national bodies of laws of the Member States. In this chapter, what is examined are the ways in which the judiciary in Southeast Europe—covering Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH), Serbia, Kosovo*, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYR Macedonia), and Albania—has dealt with the process of Europeanisation in the light of EU membership and membership aspirations.

Global Imbalances in Climate Protection, Leadership Ambitions and EU Climate Change Law

The EU’s Role in Fighting Global Imbalances looks at the role of the European Union in addressing some of the greatest challenges of our time: poverty, protectionism, climate change, and human trafficking. Contributions from ten leading scholars in the fields of economics, law, and political science provide in-depth analyses of three key dimensions of EU foreign policy, namely: the internal challenges facing the EU, as its 28 member countries struggle to coordinate their actions; the external challenges facing the EU on the global arena, in areas where global imbalances are particularly pervasive, and where measures taken by the Union can have an important impact; and the EU´s performance on the global arena, in the eyes of other key actors. Based on a broad and interdisciplinary understanding of the concept of global imbalances, this book argues that these challenges follow from pervasive global imbalances, which at root are economic, political, and legal in character.

EU climate change litigation: All quiet on the Luxembourgian front?

This chapter demonstrates that EU climate change litigation is concerned with questions about ‘who’ decides the construction and the implementation of EU climate change law, ‘who’ can challenge these legal acts, and before ‘which’ court (between the EU and the national courts) this is adjudicated. The driving force behind these competence-related issues is the EU legal doctrine concerning jurisdictional matters, and primarily the subsidiarity principle. This proves that to understand EU climate change litigation, careful attention needs to the constitutional law setting in which it is carried out.