Our international environmental law work includes cases concerning land rights, corporate responsibility, oil exploration, drilling and defending environmental campaigners.
We provide expert litigation advice and representation, covering all aspects of environmental law. Our practice team in this area is led by Marc Willers QC.
We regularly work with grassroots campaigners, high-profile charities, international and domestic NGOs, environmental campaigners and aggrieved individuals.
Areas of Expertise
- Enforcing legally binding provisions under the Paris Agreement
- Nature conservation
- Preservation of land rights against state and corporate enterprises
- Habitats including marine ecology
- Air pollution
- Sustainability
- Energy supply and exploration such as shale gas extraction or ‘fracking’
- Nuclear and toxic waste disposal
Garden Court’s commitment to the protection of the environment is long-standing. We previously worked on high-profile matters including the THORP reprocessing plant inquiry and the NIREX nuclear waste dump inquiry. Our barrister, Richard Harvey, is currently a consultant to Greenpeace International, assisting them with carrying out their environmental mission around the world.
Our casework regularly crosses over with criminal and regulatory law. For example, our barristers have considerable experience defending environmental campaigners in criminal proceedings. Garden Court is a member of the UK’s Environmental Law Foundation.
funding your case
Given some of the difficulties in obtaining legal aid for these cases, we do our best to work with other funding arrangements, including ‘no win, no fee’ agreements where appropriate, fixed fees for some matters and crowd funding.
In some cases legal action to protect the environment is protected by the Aarhus Convention, which limits the amount a claimant would have to pay a defendant if the claim is unsuccessful. The limit is £5,000 for individual claimants and £10,000 for group claimants. The Aarhus regime also imposes a cap of £35,000 to limit the amount a successful claimant can claim from a public body.
