Montenegro Court Boosts Environmental Rights

The doctrinal leap: standing without a private right

Montenegro's Constitutional Court has overturned the acquittal of China Road & Bridge Corporation for the destruction of the Tara River — and in doing so, made the Aarhus Convention a live source of constitutional standing that every future environmental prosecution in the country must now reckon with. The court's most consequential move is jurisprudential. In most civil-law systems — and indeed in leading US environmental standing doctrine — a private plaintiff generally must show a "concrete and particularized" injury to a legally protected interest of their own, the test the US Supreme Court crystallised in Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife and refined in Summers v. Earth Island Institute, both indexed by Cornell's LII. CRBC essentially made a Lujan-style argument in Podgorica: the fishing club's own rights were not adjudicated in a criminal case brought by the state, so its constitutional appeal should fail.

The Constitutional Court rejected that framing on two grounds. First, the Tara fishing area was contractually assigned to the club for management and use, giving it a direct property-like interest in the outcome. Second — and this is the doctrinal load-bearer — the court held that because the club participated in criminal proceedings "in order to protect" the constitutional right to a healthy environment, fair-trial guarantees extended to it as a representative of "the general interest of environmental protection," per the court's statement as reported by Vijesti. That is closer to the Colombian Constitutional Court's biocultural-rights reasoning in the 2016 Atrato River case than to the strict individual-injury doctrine of US federal courts, as documented in a comparative study by Cambridge University Press.

The practical effect: an environmental NGO or user-community in Montenegro can now anchor a constitutional appeal in Aarhus Article 9 even when it is nominally only an "injured party" in a state-led criminal prosecution. That widens the choke point where civil society can force courts to explain themselves.

The winners, the losers, and the highway that is still being built

The immediate winner is not the Tara River. With the criminal statute of limitations already run, the retrial in Bijelo Polje is unlikely to yield a conviction of CRBC or He Shiqiang; the prosecution's appeal against the December 2025 dismissal by the Basic Court in Kolašin is fighting a clock that has already stopped, per Vijesti's reporting on that ruling. The winner is the doctrine — and the NGOs that will invoke it in the next case.

CRBC itself is largely insulated. The company is a subsidiary of China Communications Construction Company, one of the world's three largest engineering firms; the Pelješac Bridge in Croatia, completed in 2022, was a CRBC contract, according to the OSW Centre for Eastern Studies. The Bertelsmann Stiftung has argued that Chinese contractors treat the Western Balkans as a "practice ground" for the EU market, where they learn to navigate European environmental standards before bidding in Brussels-supervised tenders. A criminal conviction in Bijelo Polje would have complicated that trajectory; the Constitutional Court's remand, ironically, will not.

The losers are Montenegro's lower courts and, indirectly, the country's EU accession file. The European Commission's 2022 country report singled out the Constitutional Court as operating in incomplete composition due to Parliament's inability to elect judges; a Bruegel review of accession-related reforms published on June 30, 2026 continues to flag rule-of-law bottlenecks in Podgorica, per Bruegel. Brussels has demanded exactly this: a functioning Constitutional Court that polices fair-trial standards in environmental cases. That the court is now doing so against a Chinese state-owned contractor is a data point Chapter 27 (environment) negotiators will notice.

The historical parallel

The closest analogue is not another Balkan case but Colombia's 2016 Atrato River ruling and Ecuador's 2019 Piatúa River decision, both of which used constitutional environmental rights to override procedural gatekeeping, per Cambridge's Transnational Environmental Law. Montenegro has not declared the Tara a legal person — but by grafting Aarhus onto its constitutional right-to-a-healthy-environment jurisprudence, the court has borrowed the same move: treating the ecological interest as itself a constitutionally cognisable value, mediated through the standing of a user-community.

For Montenegro, which ratified the Aarhus Convention in 2009 and is negotiating EU accession, the ruling closes a doctrinal gap Brussels has criticised for a decade. For the Belt and Road corridor through the Balkans, it establishes that the ledger of environmental damage from Chinese infrastructure in Europe is now being kept in constitutional case law, not just NGO reports.

What to watch

• Retrial in Bijelo Polje: The Higher Court must now re-hear the case with expert testimony directly examined. The prosecution's separate appeal of the Kolašin statute-of-limitations dismissal is pending at the same court; a consolidated ruling would clarify whether any criminal liability remains reachable.
• Second-phase construction: Montenegro has committed roughly €600 million to the Matešеvo–Andrijevica section, per the IMF's November 2025 Article IV report. Whether that contract carries retrofitted environmental safeguards after the Tara ruling is the first policy test.
• UNESCO reactive monitoring: The Tara River Basin's status under the Durmitor World Heritage listing will be reviewed at the next World Heritage Committee session; a Montenegrin constitutional ruling acknowledging riverbed devastation is now on the record before that review.
• Constitutional Court composition: Parliament's ongoing negotiations to fill vacancies, referenced in a September 2025 government-opposition agreement reported by CdM, will determine whether the Tara reasoning becomes a settled line of jurisprudence or an outlier.

The Bottom Line

The Constitutional Court did not convict CRBC — it cannot, because the statute of limitations has run. What it did was harder to reverse: it made the Aarhus Convention a live source of constitutional standing in Montenegro, so that every future environmental prosecution involving a foreign contractor can be forced back into court on procedural grounds by the community that uses the affected land or water. That is the ruling's real cargo, and it will be cited long after the Bar–Boljare highway is finished.