Environmental Mobilisation and Standing Rights in the EU: Towards a Level Playing Field?

Legal activism has been one of the main drivers of EU integration in the last decades with litigants and activist judges pushing the frontiers of integration ever further. At the same time, despite numerous calls from the ECJ for effective means for enforcing EU rights on the national level, extensive empirical differences persist regarding standing rights throughout the member states which cannot only be explained by pointing to path-dependency and legal traditions. In this context, we address two important discussions concerning the development of a legal level playing field in the EU. First, while studies in the field of legal mobilization have provided a wide array of assessments concerning the institutional, resource- and identity-based drivers of legal mobilization in several “old” EU member with differing levels of embracing “adversarial legalism”, we still know far less about how policy actors from Central and Eastern European EU member states have adopted to EU legal governance. Examining the field of environmental policy, we find that serious differences concerning prerequisites and outcomes preexist in this part of the EU. The second discussion we address is the two-faced approach of EU institutions regarding standing rights: While pressure on the member states is high on establishing a level playing field in legal terms, the EU is itself a laggard when it comes to apply these very rights. Focusing on a recent Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee case, we ask whether the credibility of the EU legal activism suffers from this discrepancy.