Systém práva životního prostředí

The growing number of regulations on environmental protection raises the need for their systematic arrangement. This urgent need is further accentuated by the necessity to provide a transparent code for all these regulations. This, however, calls for an answer to the question whether environmental law can be considered as a separate branch of law. ln order to assert the independence of this legal discipline we can employ arguments referring to history, legal theory, as well as practical life. The analysis which follows shows that environmental law is formed by the current needs of the society in a way that corresponds to the process in which the system of European law evolved from the needs of the society of the nineteenth century. Similarly, theoretical and legal arguments confirm the relative specificity of this body of rules which are all based on common principles. The practical significance of this new branch of law ensues from the megaphenomenon of human civilization threatened with the ecological collapse. There is no canonized code of environmental law. Yet it is possible to create it through exploiting vanous sources. Alongside the national ones there are sources in the selected countries of the European Union, ie. Germany, the Netherlands and Great Britain just to complement the sum of regulations coming from the European Communities. The law of the European Community and the draft code of the German environmental law apparently represent the most constructive, because the closest to the Czech tradition model of arrangement of the regulations in question. The most difficult task is to include in the arrangement the regulations and norms which fall within the category of general provisions and also to integrate the cross-section terms of the European Community law. There is no doubt that this involves the definitions of fundamental concepts and principles, cross-section terms such as environmental space, norms related to the citizens’ participation in the decision-making process, procedural rules concerning the integrated environmental protection, and the fundamental concepts of the environmental law enforcement. On the other hand, there is no special difficulty in including in the system the legal provisions concerning the protection of individual media of the environment (e.g. water, soil, air) and the protection against the threats to the environment (waste and chemical substances).