Environmental Liability

"Update Comparative Legal Study on Environmental Liability"

This 2001 study provides an update to a much larger project conducted for the European Commission by the law firm, McKenna & Co (now Cameron McKenna), London, in 1995-96. The McKenna study examined the legal position in a total of 19 countries (the 15 EU Member States, plus the US, Iceland, Norway and Switzerland).

The study is in two parts: the first part reviews the main developments in this field in selected EU Member States, since the McKenna research ended (ie, 1996 onwards) - this is reported in section 2; the second part gives a brief outline of key liability rules in five non-EU OECD countries (the USA, Canada, Australia, Japan and Switzerland) - this is given in section 3. Alongside these two, an attempt is made in section 1 (Overview), to draw together some trends and conclusions on certain aspects that have featured in the EU debate.

The following documents are available:

Terms of reference of the study (pdf ~50K)
Final Report of the study (pdf ~620K)