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

  95-117

  Dániel Deák

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  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.