Environment Playing Short‐handed: Margin of Appreciation in Environmental Jurisprudence of the E uropean Court of Human Rights

The European Court of Human Rights established the interpretative doctrine of margin of appreciation to support the subsidiarity principle underlying the whole system of the Council of Europe. Despite not being well accepted by theorists, the doctrine has found its way into many rights enshrined in the European Convention on Human Rights. This article analyzes how the Court applies the margin of appreciation in environment‐related cases, based on Article 8 of the Convention. The objective is to uncover how the wide margin of appreciation granted to States in environmental matters impacts on the environment. In that regard, the methods of the Court in hearing environmental cases and their results are examined. Special attention is paid to how the Court balances the competing interests within the fair balance assessment and how it evaluates whether the respondent State exceeded the margin of appreciation.