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• Law of Sustainable Development

  11-30

  Gyula Bándi

  Views:

  357

  Sustainability or sustainable development as an objective or as a definitions is wirely used since the 1992 Rio Conference on Sustainable Development. There are many attempts to clarify the content of it, most of them covering inter- and intragenerational equity, integration, the different means and methods of long-term thinking. While it is still a controversial question, it is also difficult or even harder to specify the legal content of such a policy matter. The law of sustainable development shall be able to meet the challanges of clarity, enforceability, thus one should try to be more specific then it is acceptabel in the wider the political context. Several international documents, conventions, even EU legislation wants to come closer to the problem. If we wish to translate the content into the legal language, then there are some elements of such a legal system, which we would like to underline: inter-generational equity and right to environment, public participation, cooperation, integration, precaution and subsidiarity. There is also a newly emerging element of the legal understanding – imported from ecology –, which needs greater attention today, that is resilience.

• Sustainable development in the EU: Review on Zsuzsanna Horváth’s Book

  158-163

  László Fodor

  Views:

  287

  Review on Zsuzsanna Horváth’s Book, the title Sustainable development in the EU. (Fenntartható fejlődés: Fenntartható termelés és fogyasztás az Európai Unióban. Dóm–Dialóg Campus, Budapest–Pécs, 2016.)

• Principle of Environmental Integration – Thoughts on the 7th EU Environment Action Programme

  31-51

  Zsuzsanna Horváth

  Views:

  185

  Integration of environmental requirements into other policies is a priority objective of the new, 7th environmental action programme of the EU. Principle of environmental integration was developed by the international environmental policy; it was inserted into environmental policy principles and into provisions of the Founding Treaty at the establishment of the EC environmental policy. The aim of the environmental integration principle harmful environmental effects, thus to serve sustainable development. Objectives of the EU sustainable development and sustainable growth strategies cannot be realized without integration of environmental requirements: integration of economic, social and environmental aspects of development can ensure the establishment of a resource- efficient, competitive economy, free from environmental degradation, improvement of quality of human life, meeting the needs of present and future generations, and preservation of natural resources which serves as the fundament for development of the other two pillars. Environmental integration is a principle provided for in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union, binding the decision-makers and legislators of the EU and the Member States; failure of its application might lead to judicial review and annulment of an act.

• Paradigm shift in management of enviromental problems: The ecosystem services concept and its legal aspects

  98-113

  Zsolt Tóth

  Views:

  169

  The majority of global environmental problems has remained unresolved mostly due to inadequate communication between natural and social sciences. This paper reviews the origin of the ecosystem services concept and presents the main valuation methods and emergence of that in legal terminology. The concept has ecological and economical roots thus can bridge environmental protection and development needs. It is clear that valuation and integration in decision-making of these essential ecological processes is one of the recent greatest scientific challenges.

• Environmental Tax Harmonisation and Market-Oriented Legal Regulation in the Light of the CJEU Practice

  95-117

  Dániel Deák

  Views:

  199

  The subject of the present paper is the explanation and justification of environmental taxes in general terms and, in particular, the assessment of the recent european trends as well as the examination of the practice of the EU Court of Justice followed in this field. The paper considers ecotaxes as the means of fiscal policy that can be put into the service of green growth. For the time being, the enforcement of ecological policy is restricted in many aspects within the EU framework, being unilaterally subordinated to the requirement of free competition. For this reason, the EU law mechanisms of adjustment may get stuck in cases where intervention is not necessary in order to have more but, on the contrary, to have less freedom of market. Since it can be considered as obvious from the perspective of thermodynamic restraints that market imperfections cannot be precluded, the possible aim of intervention is certainly not the reconstruction of free trade, but the suspension of the laws of market. The political and legal basis for this is still missing in the European Union both in theory and practice what can be seen as a serious problem.