Class Action
Environmental collective redress can be sought, in the first place, by a special piece of national legislation regulating class actions. However, only Hungary has a law that explicitly enables environmental cases to be heard within one type of the class action enacted but there is not yet any case law in place, because there have been major changes in all the general civil and administrative procedural law in recent years, including the new Act on the Code of Civil Procedure, which entered into force on 1 January 2018. It introduced two types of litigation of a collective character, public interest litigation and collective litigation. One of the conditions for a public interest claim is a particular entitlement given by a special (other) act, and then those who are entitled by the special act may initiate a case, file a suit; those who might be affected must prove their interest, namely why they belong to the group of interested parties. The environmental interest is not explicitly mentioned as an example of a public interest (which is recommended to be changed in the future); any case law is missing so far. On the other hand, the collective (or joint) litigation brought by the same new Act has an explicit reference to environmental interests. The collective lawsuit can be filed by at least 10 applicants whose rights are the same and so are the facts establishing the representative right. Such a case can be initiated only in consumer protection, labour law and environmental matters. As for environmental litigation, only compensation claims are permitted, arising out of health damage or material damage, directly caused by an unforeseeable environmental emission caused by human activity or omission. This means that the scope of this type of collective litigation is rather narrow and limited in environmental cases. Moreover, the litigation requires authorisation by the court before being heard.
In Poland, the respective Act excludes the environment from the scope of collective litigation. The Polish Act on Class Actions (Group Proceedings) was adopted in 2009. Under the Act, class action or group proceedings are civil judicial proceedings, in which claims of the same type, sharing the same or identical factual basis, are pursued by at least 10 persons. However, the subject scope of the group proceedings is strictly limited to specific areas and the environment is not among them. It means that, according to the Act in force, environmental cases cannot be judged.
In the Czech Republic, the legislation on class actions is still under preparation. A Draft Proposal of the Act on Collective Redress is now under preparation; however, there seems to be firm resistance by several groups of stakeholders in the Czech Republic to establishing class actions, so the future prospect of this Draft is not at all certain. The core of the Draft proposal lays collective action in the consumer area. Environmental harms are also covered but rather as a supplementary and minor agenda. Only a narrow view of environmental damage has therefore been projected in the Draft, conceived only as a consequence of an industrial accident. Moreover, only the damage caused to individuals (not to the environment as such) are planned to be covered, being subject to compensation within the framework of civil liability.