The approach of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Croatia towards the protection of the right to a healthy environment

Abstract

This paper analyzes provisions of the Croatian Constitution related to environmental protection, as well as their application in the case law of the Constitutional Court of the Republic of Croatia. The main aim is to examine whether the Constitutional Court considers Croatian Constitution as prescribing the right to a healthy environment although it only explicitly prescribes the right to a healthy life. The paper shall also explore the Constitutional Court’s interpretation of other environmental provision that are enshrined in the Croatian Constitution. For the purposes of writing this paper, 94 decisions of the Constitutional Court containing the word ‘human environment’ were examined. However, the paper dealt in detail with only those decisions that explicitly referred to the application of environmental provisions of the Constitution. The paper ends with conclusions which can be drawn from the case law of the Constitutional Court with an important observation that the conclusion concerning the constitutional protection of the right to a healthy environment in Croatia unfortunately cannot be deduced due to the extreme lack of cases in which applicants call for protection of this right in their constitutional complaints.