Separation of powers and militant environmental adjudication

The last decade has seen explosive growth in environmental and climate adjudication worldwide. The issues, parties, and reasoning of courts in such cases vary significantly. One recent trend is that courts are becoming increasingly inventive in their arguments in favour of particular decisions. In several instances, particularly in the European context, they address issues of democracy, constitutional guarantees, and obligations in this field. The courts appear poised to extend a more traditional, narrow doctrine of militant democracy to a broader range of environmental and climate adjudications. The presentation will discuss the prospects of such approaches, the challenges they pose, and the limitations of this phenomenon, which some might characterise as judicial activism. This presentation is part of a broader PhD research project on the separation of powers.   

Dmitrii Kuznetsov is a PhD candidate with the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He specialises in constitutional law, human rights law, and international law. He holds an LLM degree in comparative constitutional law from Central European University, Budapest/Vienna.  Dmitrii worked with the European Court of Human Rights as a case-processing lawyer, specialising in freedom of assembly, freedom of expression and fair trial rights cases. The Ved Nanda Center is pleased to welcome him as a Fulbright researcher this semester.