INTRODUCTION

Without question, environmental policy of the European Union (EU) has, over the last thirty years or so, evolved into an important integral component within the wide range of the regional international organisation’s economic and political objectives. Until the mid-1980s, though, the constitutional framework of the EU did not formally provide itself with a mandate to develop a policy on the environment. Specifically, this came about by virtue of the Single European Act (SEA) 1986, a treaty agreed between the EU’s Member States which served to amend the Union’s original founding treaties and include protection of the environment amongst its official objectives and tasks. The entry into force of the SEA signalled an important shift in relation to the identity, purpose and direction of supranational European integration. Hitherto, the EU had predominantly, if not exclusively, been founded on the objective of establishing a common market between its constituent Member States, principally through the elimination of trading barriers between them as well as other distortions to competition. At the inception of the Union, the project of realising a common market was intended to serve as the principal mechanism of achieving the core, broader ambitions of the founding treaties, which include most notably the laying of the ‘foundations of ever closer union among the peoples of Europe’, ‘to ensure the economic and social progress’ of the Member States and ‘the constant improvements of the living and working conditions’ of the Member States’ populations.1 The specific inclusion of an environmental protection policy in the political make-up of the EU in 1986 brought with it profound changes in terms of how the Union’s core aims are now interpreted and applied at a political level. Over 200 legislative measures have been passed by the EU concerning environmental protection

issues, and its constitutional commitment to environmental policy has been entrenched further and more profoundly by a later treaty amendment stipulating that environmental protection requirements must be incorporated within the definition and implementation of the entire range of its economically related policies and activities.2 It is true that EU rules on environmental protection account for only part of the legal framework that constitutes environmental law from the perspective of EU Member States. For them, the subject of environmental law also comprises rules binding on them passed at national and other international levels. However, the material range and effects of EU environmental legislation are both wide and deep. Although Member States share competence with the EU in relation to the area of environmental policy,3 national rules that conflict with the requirements of environmental measures adopted at Union level are required to be set aside, in order to respect the principle of the supremacy of EU law over national law.4 Accordingly, EU environmental law constitutes a very significant element in the overall package of measures adopted by Member States to protect the environment.