EUFJE Conference 2025 held at the Faculty of Law

Since 2004, members of the EUFJE have met annually for a major conference in one of the participating European countries – usually the EU Member State holding the rotating Presidency of the Council of the EU at the time.

This year conference in Copenhagen was opened by Prof. Luc Lavrysen, President of the EUFJE and President of the Belgian Constitutional Court, Prof. Jacob Graff Nielsen, the Dean of Faculty of Law, and Dr. Beatriz Martinez Romera, the Head of CLIMA.

Prof. Nielsen welcomed the guests and noted:

- This year’s theme, Nature Conservation and Restoration, could not be timelier. It lies at the heart of key environmental challenges, and it strongly resonates here in Denmark, where biodiversity and nature conservation has been a key strategy area.

Dr. Beatriz Martinez Romera also stressed the importance of such a conference:

- The environmental crisis we face is also a crisis of governance and enforcement, and here judges play a central role.

The presentations on the first day covered, among other things, the latest developments in EU environmental policy and legislation, updates to the Convention on Biological Diversity, new trends in biodiversity law from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and a presentation of the BIOVAL tool for compensating for environmental damage. The speakers were from the DG Environment of the European Commission, Court of Justice of the EU, European Court of Human Rights, Secretariat of the Biodiversity Convention, UNEP, European Environment Agency, and senior judges from EU Member States.

Proudly, CLIMA has been commissioned by the EUFJE to produce the 2025 EUFJE General Report on Nature Conservation and Restoration. This EUFJE general report will be submitted to the European Commission and published by EUFJE later this year. On the first day of the conference, CLIMA researchers Dr. Beatriz Martinez Romera and Dr. Meng Zhang presented the progress of drafting this general report to EUFJE General Assembly.

The second day focused on national case law from Spain, France, the Netherlands, Sweden, Denmark, Latvia, Greece, Hungary and Ukraine where judges presented current cases and legal developments in the field.

Also, a new EUFJE Board was elected during this Conference with Prof. Kari Kuusiniemi, President of the Supreme Administrative Court of Finland, as the new EUFJE president.

See the programme for the two days.

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