BeLIFE: Better Enforcement
The BeLIFE project focuses on the role citizens and civil society can play in the enforcement of and compliance assurance with European environmental law, specifically the European Green Deal.
The overall goal of the project is to improve compliance with EU environmental and climate law and to strengthen environmental democracy rights. The European Green Deal has introduced a host of new and updated pieces of legislation which increase the standards of environmental and climate protection throughout Europe. It is fair to say that one challenge, if not the biggest, of the EU environmental law acquis, is its implementation.
The project will contribute to enabling private compliance assurance and enforcement. Through giving individuals and NGOs the tools to obtain access to justice and to enforce their rights to obtain environmental information and to participate in environmental decision-making, the project will support European-wide environmental governance. These tools are enshrined as environmental democracy rights in the UNECE Aarhus Convention to which the EU and all its Member States are party.
Duration
07/2024 – 07/2027
Cooperation partner
European Environmental Bureau
Justice and Environment
Youth Environment Europe
Guta Environmental Law Association
Funded by
European Union – Life Programme
Kontakt
Luisa Schneider
Rather than focusing on compliance of one single aspect of environmental and climate law, the project aims to make a horizontal contribution to compliance of the whole European Green Deal. The intervention logic is based on the assumption that empowered individuals and civil society will exercise their environmental democracy rights to assure better compliance with EU environmental and climate law. The project aims at influencing the “rules of the game” and to empower people to use the law for the benefit of the environment and climate.
The consortium is made up of four pan-European environmental NGOs each representing vast networks of NGOs as well as five affiliate national organisations (among them UfU). It will aim to improve the available resources on environmental democracy rights, to build capacity of environmental and climate defenders and to improve the quality of environmental rights complaints.
Contribution of UfU in this project: Update and annotate the collection of the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee findings and recommendations.
In collaboration with Andriy Andrusevych we will update the case law collection of the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee (ACCC). The most recent collection, last updated a decade ago, covers cases from the period 2004 to 2014: the objective of this project is therefore to bring the collection to the present day, by incorporating the ACCC jurisprudence from the last ten years (2014-2024). Nevertheless, the aspiration is also to undertake a comprehensive restructuring of the collection, transforming it into an annotated resource which provides a more easily accessible breakdown of the most relevant cases for lawyers and non-lawyers alike. The updating of this collection will be closely coupled with a wide dissemination of the resultant publication which will support environmental compliance and access to justice, including through sparking new case law and give the academic debate on environmental democracy a newfound inspiration.