Article | REF: G1021 V1

Contractual environmental liability

Author: Nadège COLOMBET

Publication date: July 10, 2003

You do not have access to this resource.
Click here to request your free trial access!

Already subscribed? Log in!


Overview

Français

Read this article from a comprehensive knowledge base, updated and supplemented with articles reviewed by scientific committees.

Read the article

AUTHOR

  • Nadège COLOMBET: DEA in environmental and urban planning law Envirodroit.net, Red-on-line company

 INTRODUCTION

This article supplements article on "Principles of environmental liability", which covers all liability regimes (criminal, administrative, civil) with the exception of contractual civil liability.

A contract is an agreement creating one or more obligations, or creating or transferring a right. A contract is usually considered to exist as soon as the two parties have agreed on the thing and the price. The notion of the parties' consent therefore comes into play, as does their mutual knowledge of the thing and the price. In the environmental field, certain types of contract have numerous applications. These include consultancy, study, expertise and technical inspection contracts, as well as design and implementation contracts. There are also contracts for the transfer and acquisition of land (soil pollution).

Contractual liability is incurred on the basis of the obligations arising from the contract. The "operative event", i.e. the event giving rise to the pollution damage, is the non-performance of the contract. One of the parties to the contract must therefore invoke the prejudice caused by the total or partial non-performance of the contract by the other party (the "cocontractor" or "debtor") in order to be able to raise this liability.

The specificity of this field is its extreme flexibility. Since contracts are the law of the parties (art. 1134 of the French Civil Code), liability criteria can be freely determined and applied by the parties, provided there is no contradiction with public policy.

There is no system of contractual liability specific to the environment. We will therefore look at the general system of contractual liability, set out in articles 1146 to 1155 of the Civil Code, and apply it more specifically to this field.

You do not have access to this resource.

Exclusive to subscribers. 97% yet to be discovered!

You do not have access to this resource.
Click here to request your free trial access!

Already subscribed? Log in!


The Ultimate Scientific and Technical Reference

A Comprehensive Knowledge Base, with over 1,200 authors and 100 scientific advisors
+ More than 10,000 articles and 1,000 how-to sheets, over 800 new or updated articles every year
From design to prototyping, right through to industrialization, the reference for securing the development of your industrial projects

This article is included in

Environment

This offer includes:

Knowledge Base

Updated and enriched with articles validated by our scientific committees

Services

A set of exclusive tools to complement the resources

Practical Path

Operational and didactic, to guarantee the acquisition of transversal skills

Doc & Quiz

Interactive articles with quizzes, for constructive reading

Subscribe now!

Ongoing reading
Contractual environmental liability