Brussels, 22/01/2002 (Agence Europe) - On Wednesday, the European Commission is to define the Community environmental liability regime that it proposes to establish in the Union in order to guarantee that, in the future, polluters will be recognised as responsible for the damage they cause to the environment and will have to bear the cost. At an initiative from Margot Wallström, Environment Commissioner, the College of Commissioners is to adopt during its weekly meeting the proposal for a framework directive establishing minimum common rules in the interest of the environment and public health. This should make up for the shortcomings noted in national liability systems and meet the public's growing concern about repeated environmental disasters due to human activity (after the sinking of the Erika, the explosion of the AZF factory in Toulouse is the latest example).
Established on the basis of comments received by the Commission during the consultation process on its White Paper in February 2000, the Commission proposal should combine two liability systems. These are:
Strict liability regime (fault-free) for traditional damage caused to people or goods, for the contamination of sites or for harm done to biodiversity by potentially dangerous activities regulated by Community legislation in the field of the environment (for example: Seveso Directive, IPPC Directive on integrated pollution and prevention control, Directive on dangerous substances, etc.).
Liability regime (fault-based) for harm caused to biodiversity through non-dangerous activities. This regime would be limited to harm caused to the natural resources (fauna and flora) protected in the context of the European network of natural habitats protected under the Habitats Directive.
Identification of the party responsible will make it possible to designate that party at the national courts that will rule on the amount of costs for restoring polluted sites to their initial state. In the case of pollution from several sources (diffused) and the impossibility of identifying the person responsible for damage caused to the environment with certainty, it would be the State which, as a last resort, would be held responsible for the cost of decontaminating polluted sites.
This long-awaited, horizontal directive, based on the polluter-pays principle, could play a decisive role in the debate under way on relaunching marketing authorisations for genetically modified organisms, affected since June 1999 by a de facto moratorium in the European Union. In response to the Member States, with France in the lead, which called for provisions on responsibility in the event of harm to the environment resulting from plants derived from new technologies to be included in the legislation governing the authorisation of GMOs (Directive 2001/18 replacing Directive 90/220/EEC), Margot Wallström answered that the Commission preferred a general liability regime covering all environmental damage to sector-specific provisions meeting specific concerns on a case by case basis. It will be up to the more reticent Member States to judge whether the Commission's proposal meets their expectations and is sufficient for them to agree, as the Commission would like, on lifting the moratorium by 2003 at the latest.
If, on Wednesday, the Commission adopts the proposal of directive, it will be submitted to the Council and to the European Parliament, in the context of codecision procedure.