EU WATER LAW and POLICY

2 - High level of protection and sustainable development

The objectives of the EU Water policy are in line with the objectives of the EU environmental policy which are listed in Article 191(1) TFEU. Furthermore, the “union policy on the environment shall aim at a high level of protection taking into account the diversity of situations in the various regions of the Union” (Article 191 (2). The Charter of Fundamental Rights emphasises this requirement of a high level of environmental protection and its integration into all the policies of the EU “in accordance with the principle of sustainable development” (article 37). The WFD thus aims at promoting “sustainable water use based on a long-term protection of available water resources” .
The first objective, that of protection of the environment itself, can be described as “quasi-exhaustive” in as much as it provides for “preserving, protecting and improving the quality of the environment.” Environmental policy also pursues an objective of “protecting human health”, to which water is essential; this second objective relies on an anthropocentric conception of the environment, and this even though the European Union also has a specific, albeit limited, competence in the area of public health (Article 168 TFEU). More recently, the EU has promoted a “one health approach” based on the interconnection between human and animal health and the health of ecosystems, in particular in the context of the fight against water pollution by pharmaceuticals . The third objective of environmental policy, which consists of the “prudent and rational utilisation of natural resources”, obviously encompasses water resources as one of its main concerns. And even the fourth objective of environmental policy, which consists of “promoting measures at international level to deal with regional or worldwide environmental problems (...)”, has strong connections with the EU’s waters, some of which belong to rivers which travel through the territories of several Member States such as the Danube and the Rhine. The Union is also a contracting party to the 1992 Convention on the protection and use of transboundary watercourses and international lakes .

The EU water legislation is also based on the principles of the European environmental policy, in particular on the precautionary principle, the preventive action principle, the polluter-pays principle, and the correction by priority at source principle. The principle of integration of the environmental requirements into all the policies is also key to ensuring the ecological coherence of the legal environmental protection by the EU. The principle of non-regression is not yet expressly recognised by the Treaty. However, the purpose behind this principle appears in EU Water Legislation as early as 1975. Directive 75/440/EEC on the surface water stated that “implementation of the measures taken pursuant to this directive may under no circumstances lead either directly or indirectly to deterioration of the current quality of surface water” . According to the current Water Framework Directive (article 4(1)), the Member States have to ensure the prevention of the deterioration of the status of all bodies of surface water and of groundwater. As interpreted by the Court, this objective “has binding effects“ and the obligation to prevent the deterioration of the status of all bodies of water “remains binding at every stage of the implementation of the directive” .