President Omejec Lecture on Environmental Protection from the Human Rights Perspective

23 October 2014 - Professor Dr Jasna Omejec, President of the Court, gave a lecture today at a Round table on the administrative law protection of environment organised by the State Administration, Judiciary and the Rule of Law Scientific Council of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts. In her address on environmental protection from the human rights perspective she presented fundamental postulates of the protection in the case-law of the European Court of Human Rights. She noted that this Court cherish a self-restraining approach in accepting the environmental dimension of the rights and limits the protection under the Convention only to cases where the very core of these rights has been violated by interventions in the environment. She also noted that the member states enjoy strong sovereignty in this sphere deeming that the ecological dimension will not enter the Convention any time soon. 
At the end she referred to the Croatian Constitution which in Article 69 provides the Constitutional Court with the firm grounds for its active approach not only in the sphere of the protection of environment but also the constitutional ground for imposing on the state different obligations for the protection of not only human health or human environment but also the nature as such.