Faculty backs specialist environmental tribunal
Scotland should have a specialist tribunal or court for deciding environmental cases, according to the Faculty of Advocates.
Responding to a consultation on the creation of such a tribunal, Faculty supports the call by Friends of the Earth Scotland for such a move, and believes it could sit at venues around the country, rather than having a fixed base.
In a recent announcement, the Lord President put forward the idea of an Energy & Natural Resources Court within the Court of Session but which could sit outside Edinburgh as required. "Given the close link between energy and environmental issues – evident most obviously in the context of renewables – it would be natural to include environmental law within the jurisdiction of that court", Faculty states.
It adds: “The main benefits of a specialist Environmental Tribunal or Environmental Court – whether within the Court of Session or a new separate Environmental Court – would be efficiency through specialisation and expertise. This should enable the court to deal with environmental cases more swiftly and, therefore, more cost effectively than such cases are sometimes dealt with at present.
Faculty also suggests that in cases of significant public interest, an individual or community group should be able to recover expenses from a developer or public authority, even if they lose the case, which it maintains could help meet the obligation under the Aarhus Convention to have processes in place to assist challenges to decision-making.
“In effect, if the issue is one which should, in the public interest, be litigated, the court should have the power to allocate expenses in a manner which reflects that public interest”, the submission states.
Another aid would be to make legal aid should be available to community groups, rather than to individuals within community groups.