Paper on Costs in Environmental Procedure

Paper written by Jan Därpo, Professor in Environmental law at Uppsala Universitet and the Chair of the Task Force on Access to Justice, concerning the cost in environmental procedure. According to Article 9.4 of the Aarhus Convention, environmental review procedures shall be “ … fair, equitable, timely and not prohibitively expensive”. However, high legalcosts have been described as one of the main barriers for the public concerned to haveaccess to justice. This memo intends to summarize the most important costs in the procedureand to give some general reflections on a number of key issues on the subject.