The plaintiff Urgenda, a foundation committed to a more sustainable society, brought a claim on behalf of over 800 individuals against the defendant, the state of the Netherlands, regarding climate change. Specifically, the plaintiff asked the court to rule that it would be unlawful for the defendant not to reduce annual greenhouse gas emissions by …Read more

The governor of the Miyazaki Prefecture granted permission for a company that collects, transports, and disposes of industrial waste to establish an industrial waste treatment facility. When the company applied for permission, it submitted a document called the “Environmental Impact Survey Report,” which detailed the survey results regarding the impact of the establishment of the …Read more

This case addressed the issue of whether Hong Kong’s Director of Environmental Protection (the ͞Director) had the authority to approve an environmental impact assessment (the ͞EIA) of certain proposed Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macau Bridge projects (the ͞HKZMB Projects) if the EIA did not contain a quantitative stand-alone analysis of the projected environmental impact of the HKZMB Projects. …Read more

B, a Romanian national, was sentenced to ten years in prison for fraud by the Court of Appeal of Timisoara. In January 2003 B lodged an application with the European Court of Human Rights based on the conditions of his detention in the prisons of Arad and Timisoara. B alleged that Romania violated Article 3 (prohibition of torture) of the European …Read more

This case was heard together with case 70/2009-0-0. The Petitioners, Miroslav Grcev and Stamen Filipov, challenged the constitutionality of the Anti-Smoking Law (the Law). The Law banned smoking in public premises, advertising cigarettes, and selling cigarettes to persons under the age of 16. Public premises included institutions for education, health, state administration,  public transport, and …Read more

This case was heard together with case 261/2008-0-0. The Petitioners, Miroslav Grcev and Stamen Filipov, challenged the constitutionality of the Anti-Smoking Law (the Law). The Law banned smoking in public premises, advertising cigarettes, and selling cigarettes to persons under the age of 16. Public premises included institutions for education, health, state administration,  public transport, and …Read more

In May 2007, the State of Panama, without community consultation, granted a concession for the construction of a hydroelectric dam within the traditional lands of an indigenous community, the Ngöbe. Although the construction of the dam was still in its initial stages at the time the petition was filed, the petitioner alleged that the work …Read more

The applicants were a group that advocates for improvement of Hong Kong’s air quality. They alleged that the Hong Kong government did not enact adequate legislation or effective policy to combat air pollution and that this failure was a breach of the government’s legal duty to ensure the right to life and the right to …Read more

The four applicants alleged that pollution levels near their homes violated their right to respect for their private and family life under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights (“Convention”). All the applicants lived within a “sanitary security zone” around a local steel plant and were exposed to concentrations of dangerous substances above …Read more

This case was originally brought before the First Chamber of the Contentious Administrative Tribunal by a group of organizations of the Amazon Basin in Ecuador who were challenging the fact that Colombia was fumigating with glyphosate (within their plan to eradicate coca) within a 10-km strip from the border of Colombia and Ecuador. The organizations …Read more