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.

Contribution of UfU: Update and annotate the collection of the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee findings and recommendations

In collaboration with Andriy Andrusevych, Luisa Schneider has updated the compilation of decisions by the Aarhus Compliance Committee (ACCC). The previous compilation, which was last updated ten years ago, had previously only included cases from 2004 to 2014. The aim of this project was therefore to bring the collection up to date by also analysing the more recent ACCC decisions from the last eleven years (2014–2025). In addition, the collection was comprehensively restructured to transform it into an annotated resource that provides both legal professionals and the general public with easier access to relevant cases.

The BeLIFE project

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.

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.