The European Commission has opened a procedure for breaches of Community law against ten member states: more specifically the procedure is for “violation of Directive 85/33/CEE and its follow-ups relating to the impact of some public and private projects on the environment”. The decision to proceed against the ten countries is dictated by the need to make the implementation of big projects of infrastructural, industrial and mining type conditional on a prior and reliable assessment of their environmental impact: the declared objective of the European Commissioner for the Environment Stavros Dimas is “to ensure that an assessment ex ante be conducted for all projects that have an impact on the environment”. The ten countries being proceeded against are Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Germany, Greece, Luxembourg, Malta, Holland, Poland and the Czech Republic. In conformity with European law, they now have a four-month period in which to present “observations” on the alleged infringements and reply in a “satisfactory” manner, to prevent the Executive appealing directly to the Court of Justice in Luxembourg.
