Environmental ngos and rules of standing. The Aarhus Convention in the EU perspective.

The Aarhus Convention, signed by the EU in 1998 and approved by the same organisation in 2005, sets special rules for the public (especially, the environmental NGOs) to have access to justice in environmental matters, though conditioning it to the framework of the signing Parties’ national legislation. In implementing the Convention, through Regulation 1367/2006, however, the EU adopted a restrictive approach, both on the side of the procedure (internal review) and on the side of the challengeable measures (individual acts), leaving small room for the NGOs’ access to justice. This situation led the environmental NGOs to trigger two parallel disputes, one on the EU judiciary side and one on the international side (this latter still in a ‘suspended’ state). The article seeks to analyse the two controversies in the light of the inconsistencies between the EU and the international legal systems.