Access to Justice

The quality (concentration) limit values of Directive 2008/50/EC aim at the protection of human health. Thus, they have the objective to protect an individual right to health. They are sufficiently precise and unconditional to be of direct application. This means that the individual person has a right to trace back the limit values in his/her national legislation; it follows from this that Member States are obliged to transpose limit values of Air Quality Directive 2008/50/EC into their national law (case C-361/88, Commission v. Germany).       Furthermore, the Court of Justice of the European Union confirmed in case C-237/07, Janecek (paragraph 38)       that

Article 13 of Air Quality Directive 2008/50/EC provides that limit values must not be exceeded. However, it follows from Article 23 that when such exceedance takes place, a Member State is obliged to elaborate an air quality plan; when there is a risk that an alert threshold is exceeded, the Member State is obliged, under Article 24, to elaborate a short-term action plan. The question is, whether an individual person has a right to see such plans elaborated.