The purpose of this study is to identify the legal problems related to the obligation to report on sustainable development, which arise from the norms contained in European Union acts, juxta-posed with the restriction of the right to information on the environment and its protection under national legislation. The content of the reporting obligation is discussed, the entities subject to it are indicated and the general principles of reporting under the CSRD are summarised. Subsequently, the right to information on the environment and its protection was analysed in terms of subject and object scope, referring to the Constitution of the Republic of Poland, as well as to the Act on the provision of information on the environment and its protection, public participation in environmental protection and environmental impact assessments. In this context, the question of the impact of the limitation of the right to information on the environment and its protection on
the implementation of the sustainability reporting obligation was answered.

The concept of environmental constitutionalism, describing the state’s duty to protect the environment correlated with the rights of individuals, may be used to characterise the relations between environmental protection and the socio-political system of a modern democratic state in the era of the transformation towards sustainable development. The state’s legal system cannot be neutral in that regard. It is particularly important in case of the challenges resulting from Poland’s international and EU law obligations, especially under the Aarhus Convention and human rights law. On this basis, it can be claimed that environmental protection as a duty of the state is a “positive obligation”, in light of which the possibility to exercise rights by individuals may be assessed, including environmental ones (substantive and procedural). When the state fails to fulfil the duty to create the necessary legal framework and to secure its effective enforcement, it may result in the exposure of the members of the public to the degraded environment (e.g., to the ambient air of a bad quality, i.e. smog). Thus, they should be able to rely on international and EU law guarantees while seeking legal remedies, including civil lawsuits. In such a context, the 2021 Supreme Court resolution in case III CZP 27/20 illustrates the actual degree of “greening” the concept of private interests in Polish law. The article aims to present the environmental law’s perspective and evaluate the relevant argumentation visible in the SC’s reasoning and the glossators’ commentaries. The findings can be used to support the thesis that any constructive debate about “greening” Article 23–24 of the Civil Code requires an interdisciplinary approach.

The Aarhus Convention guarantees several procedural rights which the concerned public can actively use as long as it is involved in the environmental impact assessment procedure. This international treaty assumes that the affected public uses its procedural rights with the intention of ensuring the protection of the environment. In practice, however, this may not be the case. Using a specific example from Slovakia, the author points to a case where there was a suspicion that a non-governmental organization was using its subjective rights pursuing a goal other than it is required by the Aarhus Convention. The administrative authorities believed that such behavior could be an abuse of the procedural rights guaranteed by the Convention and therefore they sought legal tools within the administrative law, the use of which would not be in conflict with the Aarhus Convention. This article addresses the issue of legal limits that prevent parties from restricting the procedural rights of the concerned public guaranteed by the Aarhus Convention.

The Aarhus Convention is an international agreement ratified by Poland, the essence of which is the obligation of the parties to introduce into the national legal order solutions guaranteeing access to information relating to the environment, public participation in decision-making processes affecting the state and level of the environmental protection and access to justice in these matters. The powers under the Aarhus Convention, despite its legal rank higher than that of a law, are not used in practice due to the lack of self-enforcement of the Convention. The author’s intention is to indicate potential possibilities of taking its provisions into account in the process of law application by administrative courts and in the process of hierarchical control of norms by the Constitutional Court.

The subject of this paper are penal solutions – embracing liability for offences, petty offences and administrative infringements – that may be used in the cases of violation of provisions on access to the environmental information under the Polish, Czech and Slovak law. First, the article’s author uses the comparative approach to analyse the development of the right to environmental information in these three legal systems. Then, he searches for answers to the question about the genesis, evolution and functioning of specific penal solutions aimed at behaviours that violate this subjective right of the members of the public, being one of the three pillars of public participation in environmental matters under the Aarhus Convention.

The paper deals with development of the legal regulation of public participation, specifically of ecological associations dealing with nature and landscape protection, in proceedings in which the public interest in nature and landscape protection may be affected. Typically, this concerns the permitting of construction projects in the landscape. The article’s author shows that the originally broad concept of public participation in proceedings under Nature and Landscape Protection Act and under other laws from the environmental law system has gradually become limited by the legislators. The alleged limitation of the right of public participation was recently also addressed by the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic. By a very close vote (8 : 7), it approved the legislation limiting public participation in administrative proceedings following
proceedings under the Nature and Landscape Protection Act. In the text, the author discussed the different opinions on this ruling of the Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic. Thus, the article aims to present observations de lege lata (using the so-called follow-up proceedings as a case study) regarding access to justice in environmental matters for environmental organizations from the perspective of the Czech legal system. It can be an interesting contribution to the discussion on EU-wide challenges in this matter, inter alia, because the article provides an in-depth legal context that may be useful for comparative purposes.