A Thundering Silence: Environmental Rights in the Dialogue between the EU Court of Justice and the European Court of Human Rights

The aim of the article is to shed light on the particular issue of absence of judicial dialogue between the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) and the Court of Justice of the EU (CJEU) in the matter of environmental rights which represents a glaring exception to the generally cooperative disposition exhibited by the two courts in other domains linked to human rights protection. The article draws on this particular absence of judicial dialogue by examining the respective patterns of judicial reasoning employed by the CJEU and the ECtHR in cases before them that involve, or have a bearing on, environmental rights (substantive and procedural). Thus, the singular tendencies discernible in the ECtHR's progressive jurisprudence in the field of environmental rights will be compared to CJEU's jurisprudence relevant to environmental rights with the intention of detecting certain aspects in the CJEU's approach which could further stand to be improved following the example of ECtHR's activist environmental jurisprudence as a viable avenue for initiating the currently missing dialogue between the two courts in the matter of environmental rights.