Collective Redress as New Institution of Civil Procedure Code and Its Applicability to Protect Environment

  • Barbara Tóth University of Miskolc, Faculty of Law, Department of Civil Procedural Law
Keywords: collective redress, public enforcement, collective litigation, environmental impact, right to healthy environment

Abstract

The Constitutional Court has interpreted it in its decision the right to healthy environment, as a fundamental right, includes the state is obliged not to decrease the level of environmental protection provided by law. The Fundamental Law contains that anyone who causes damage to the environment shall be obliged to restore it. But who should claim the polluter, and how? It is typical in the case of damages caused to environment that individual claims are (relatively) limited, small, but on the whole are very significant. In the case of low value claims litigation probably does not mean a beneficial solution, so it reduces the effectiveness of litigations. To solve this problem, the new Code of Civil Procedure introduced two different forms of collective redress to the Hungarian legal system: public enforcement, as a type of the opt-out model and collective litigation, as an opt-in model.

Published
2017-10-01
Section
Cikkek