JR rules ‘will weaken climate governance’
Community Law and Mediation (CLM) has criticised new regulations setting out a scale of fees for environmental judicial reviews.
The regulations, signed last week by Minister for Climate, Energy and the Environment Darragh O'Brien and Minister for Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Services Reform and Digitalisation Jack Chambers, came into effect yesterday (18 May).
The Government argues that the current system, under which a public body is liable for the legal costs of the successful applicant if a judicial review is upheld, has brought about “unpredictable costs” for the taxpayer.
‘Irrecoverable’ costs
CLM chief executive Aoife Kelly-Desmond, however, described the regulations as “just one in a long list of measures this government is pursuing that would weaken climate governance and limit public scrutiny by restricting access to judicial review”.
Kelly-Desmond said that the rules would expose successful applicants to “irrecoverable” costs, adding that the effect would be to deter ordinary people from challenging unlawful decisions and “entrench poor decision-making and a lack of accountability in public bodies”.
She said that corporate interests with the means to pay expensive private lawyers would not be affected by the regulations.
‘Last resort’
“Independent law centres such as CLM rely on judicial review as a last resort to hold the State to account on matters of vital public interest – including compliance with legally binding climate and environmental commitments,” the CLM chief executive stated.
She added that the regulations were incompatible with the Aarhus Convention, which requires access to the courts to be fair, equitable, and not prohibitively expensive.
The Law Society has also strongly opposed the measures on access-to-justice grounds.