High Court recognises ‘constitutional right to environmental protection’

In a judgment more than 300 pages long, Mr Justice Max Barrett said Friends of the Irish Environment had raised “profound constitutional issues that affect the entire population”.

The group, represented by John Kenny BL, instructed by FP Logue Solicitors, had brought one of three failed challenges to the extension of time for the construction of a new runway at Dublin Airport.

The challenges failed as there is no requirement in Irish law for public participation in the extension of a planning permission.

However, Mr Justice Barrett ruled: “A right to an environment that is consistent with the human dignity and well-being of citizens at large is an essential condition for the fulfilment of all human rights. It is an indispensable existential right that is enjoyed universally, yet which is vested personally as a right that presents and can be seen always to have presented, and to enjoy protection, under Art. 40.3.1 of the Constitution. It is not so utopian a right that it can never be enforced.”

He continued: “Concrete duties and responsibilities will fall in time to be defined and demarcated. But to start down that path of definition and demarcation, one first has to recognise that there is a personal constitutional right to an environment that is consistent with the human dignity and well-being of citizens at large and upon which those duties and responsibilities will be constructed. This the court does.”

In his reasoning, he acknowledged the universality of environmental rights in religious and secular thought. He emphasised urgency in the context of the present environmental crisis noting the “greater public awareness that the quality of our life as a nation, and as members of the wider human community, is threatened by the processes which have yielded the very quality of life which we presently enjoy”.

In a statement, Friends of the Irish Environment said it was considering an appeal in relation to the “narrow points of law” on which the case was dismissed, but strongly welcomed the decision.

A spokesperson for the group said: “We expect this decision to have profound implications beyond the scope of this case.

“The state now has a duty to protect the environment in a way that is consistent with this newly established right.”