Europe in Green: European Environmental Democracy

The Aarhus Convention was signed by the European Commission on behalf of the European Community with the intent of ratifying it; however, before this occurred, the European legislation was necessarily adapted to the rights and obligations contained therein. In line with this, the three specific rights, called Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-Making, and Access to Justice, which were set out in the Aarhus Convention, have also emerged and have been implemented by the Member States as well as at the EU level. Chapter I focuses on the implications of environmental democracy for the EU. It begins by exploring if there is democracy and which kind of democracy exists in the EU, further scrutinising the relationship between Europe and the environment and finally analysing whether a theoretical model of environmental democracy exists in European law; in other words whether the environmental rights and ecological duties can be considered as already existing, and if so, whether there is the basis to construct an environmental and ecological citizenship. Based on the results of Chapter I, Chapter II gives an overview of the implementation of the substantive provisions in its three pillars’ rights, and of the attempts to implement ecological duties, firstly at the EU level and then at the Members States’ level. The goal of Chapter II is not to explain the legislations in detail since the work has already been covered already by numerous scholars, but rather to put emphasis on the fundamental elements regarding the implementation of both the environmental rights and duties emerging from the surface of the different environmental legislations.