The Growing Role of Expert Members in Environmental Adjudication: the Case of the Indian National Green Tribunal

The enforcement of environmental law is today suffering in most of the world of poor implementation and often the executive powers tend to abdicate their responsibilities to the judiciary. In this perspective, the current trend has been to build up specialized courts and tribunals to deal with environmental cases and to make easier the access to justice for citizens, NGOs and disadvantaged groups. The high technical level characterizing environment matters has led many judicial bodies to equip themselves with the necessary expertise, including impartial “expert members” from research institutes and universities. The solution adopted reduces the discretion in favour of the application of scientific standards, creating multidisciplinary courts. For this reason, nowadays we can count over 1.200 Environmental Courts and Tribunals (ECTS), especially in developing or recently developed countries, which share the characteristic of a hybrid legal/scientific board. One of the most interesting reform in this field was approved in June 2010 in India with the launch of the National Green Tribunal (NGT), exclusively dedicated to environmental matters. This article will illustrate the legal and political issues leading to the establishment of the Indian National Green Tribunal. It will describe its composition, considering that the NGT Act requires the same number (from 10 to 20) of judges and experts and the possibility for the Chairperson to summon (if considered necessary) any person having specialised knowledge and experience in a particular case to assist the Tribunal. Starting from the most relevant judicial cases, the final part of the essay analyses the 2010/2017 NGT activity, illustrating the recent trend towards a strong preference for specialized and technical boards in environmental adjudication.