Vedder, Hans --- "Integrating rather than juxtaposing environmental policy and the internal market" [2017] ELECD 272; in Koutrakos, Panos; Snell, Jukka (eds), "Research Handbook on the Law of the EU’s Internal Market" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2017) 171

Book Title: Research Handbook on the Law of the EU’s Internal Market

Editor(s): Koutrakos, Panos; Snell, Jukka

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781783478095

Section: Chapter 9

Section Title: Integrating rather than juxtaposing environmental policy and the internal market

Author(s): Vedder, Hans

Number of pages: 20

Abstract/Description:

The internal market, and notably the free movement of goods, has resulted in a wealth of case law and legislation concerning the interface with environmental protection measures. Most EU lawyers will be familiar with cases like Danish Bottles or Mickelsson & Roos that were both triggered by a Member State that enacted an environmental protection measure. In those cases the Court used Articles 34 and 36 TFEU to find an adequate balance between the interest of ensuring the free movement of goods on the one hand and the environmental protection requirements on the other. Articles 34–36 TFEU, however, provide only minimal guidance as to how this balance should be struck in an individual case. This is why the Treaty envisages the adoption of harmonising measures that lay down an EU-wide more or less uniform appraisal of the free movement and environmental protection. This chapter will first study the Treaty framework for such harmonising measures and examine some typical features of this harmonisation. It will then analyse the Court’s case law concerning the free movement of goods. This involves a number of lesser known cases and more prominent judgments often perceived as inconsistent. Much of this jurisprudence is construed in literature as the result of a juxtaposition of environmental protection and economic concerns where the latter is equated with the internal market. It is submitted that framing environmental protection and economic/market integration concerns as opposing interests ignores important elements that can be used to understand the, indeed at times seemingly troublesome, acquis in this regard.