Individuals who wish to access a website or qualify for a loan are expected to expose personally identifying information, undermining their privacy and security. Firms share proprietary information in dealmaking negotiations which, if the deal fails, may be used by the negotiating partner for a competitive advantage. Regulators are expected to disclose their algorithmic tools to comply with public transparency and oversight requirements, a practice that risks rendering these tools circumventable and ineffective. Litigants might have to reveal trade secrets in court proceedings to prove a claim or defense. Such âverification dilemmasâ â costly choices between opportunities that require the verification of some fact and risks of exposing sensitive information in order to perform that verification â appear across the legal landscape. Yet existing legal responses to them are imperfect. Legal responses often depend on ex post litigation procedures that can be prohibitively expensive for those most in need or are otherwise ineffective. Zero-knowledge proofs (ZKPs) â a class of cryptographic protocols that enables verification of a fact or characteristic of secret information without learning the actual secret â can help to avoid these verification dilemmas. ZKPs can provide a feasible means for a party who holds secret information to demonstrate desirable properties of this information while keeping the information otherwise hidden. Yet ZKPs have received scant notice in the legal literature. This Article fills that gap by providing the first deep dive into ZKPsâ broad relevance for law. It explains ZKPsâ conceptual power and technical operation to a legal audience. It then demonstrates how ZKPs can be applied as a governance tool to transform verification dilemmas in multiple legal contexts. Finally, the Article surfaces and provides a framework to address the policy issues implicated by introducing of ZKP governance tools into existing law and practice.
We propose a privacy-preserving scheme to outsource zero-knowledge proof generation to a party that we call a worker. Our scheme can be applied to zk-SNARKs with a trusted setup, zero-knowledge proofs deployed in many applications. Compared to known privacy-preserving outsourcing schemes, our scheme is more practical in the sense that the computational and memory load on the worker is almost the same as that on the prover in cases where the provers generate proofs on their own.
Domain-specific Microservice Reference Architectures (MSRA) have become relevant study objects in software technology. They facilitate the technical evaluation of service designs, compositions patterns and deployment configurations in realistic operational practice. Current knowledge about MSRA is predominantly confined to business domains with modest numbers of users per application. Due to the ongoing massive digital transformation of society, people-related online services in e-government, e-health and similar domains must be designed to be highly scalable at entire nation level at affordable infrastructure cost. With ZVAX, we present such a service in the e-health domain. Specifically, the ZVAX implementation adheres to an MSRA for pandemic-related processes such as vaccination registration and passenger locator form submission, with emphasis on selectable levels of privacy. We argue that ZVAX is valuable as study object for the training of software engineers and for the debate on arbitrary government-to-people services at scale.
Carsten Baum, Lennart Braun, Alexander Munch-Hansen, Peter Schöll
Zero-knowledge proof systems are usually designed to support computations for circuits over $$\mathbb {F}_2$$ or $$\mathbb {F}_p$$ for large p, but not for computations over $$\mathbb {Z}_{2^k}$$ , which all modern CPUs operate on. Although $$\mathbb {Z}_{2^k}$$ -arithmetic can be emulated using prime moduli, this comes with an unavoidable overhead. Recently, Baum et al. (CCS 2021) suggested a candidate construction for a designated-verifier zero-knowledge proof system that natively runs over $$\mathbb {Z}_{2^k}$$ . Unfortunately, their construction requires preprocessed random vector oblivious linear evaluation (VOLE) to be instantiated over $$\mathbb {Z}_{2^k}$$ . Currently, it is not known how to efficiently generate such random VOLE in large quantities. In this work, we present a maliciously secure, VOLE extension protocol that can turn a short seed-VOLE over $$\mathbb {Z}_{2^k}$$ into a much longer, pseudorandom VOLE over the same ring. Our construction borrows ideas from recent protocols over finite fields, which we non-trivially adapt to work over $$\mathbb {Z}_{2^k}$$ . Moreover, we show that the approach taken by the QuickSilver zero-knowledge proof system (Yang et al. CCS 2021) can be generalized to support computations over $$\mathbb {Z}_{2^k}$$ . This new VOLE-based proof system, which we call QuarkSilver, yields better efficiency than the previous zero-knowledge protocols suggested by Baum et al. Furthermore, we implement both our VOLE extension and our zero-knowledge proof system, and show that they can generate 13â50 million VOLEs per second for $${64}\,{\textrm{bit}}$$ to $${256}\,{\textrm{bit}}$$ rings, and evaluate $${1.3}\,\textrm{million}$$ $${64}\,{\textrm{bit}}$$ multiplications per second in zero-knowledge.
It is crucial to ensure the privacy and authenticity of patientsâ medical data in the medical insurance claim process, but in the current medical insurance claim process, there are some problems such as low efficiency, complex service, unreliable data and data leakage. Therefore, considering the privacy and sensitivity of patientsâ medical data, we can improve the current issues by employing blockchain, smart contracts and zero-knowledge proof technology. In this paper, we propose a novel medical insurance claim scheme based on smart contracts, blockchain and zero-knowledge proof. Our scheme mainly involves two scenarios: medical insurance purchasing and medical insurance claiming. In the privacy-preserving transaction phases of the two scenarios, we can ensure the legitimacy and privacy of the transactions between the patients and the insurance companies by using a non-interactive zero-knowledge proof and the homomorphic encryption algorithm under the Decisional Bilinear DiffieâHellman (DBDH) assumption. In the identity privacy-preserving phases of the two scenarios, we can ensure the legitimacy and the privacy of patientsâ identities by integrating Schnorr protocol and FiatâShamir heuristic method. The security analysis, the computation cost and the communication cost of our scheme are given. Compared with our referred schemes, the performance evaluation shows that our scheme not only meets the requirements of the legality of the medical insurance claim, but also ensures the authenticity and privacy of the patientsâ medical data. Moreover, the experimental results demonstrate that our scheme is feasible and has an acceptable time overhead.
Open access
2 source records
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Privacy-Preserving Technologies in Data
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Tao Feng, Pu Yang, Chunyan Liu, Junli Fang · 5 authors
The data generated in the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has important research value. In the process of data sharing, data privacy, security, and data availability are important issues that cannot be ignored. This paper proposes a blockchain privacy protection scheme based on zeroâknowledge proof to realize the secure sharing of data among data owners, cloud service providers, and semitrusted cloud servers. First, the method of combining zeroâknowledge proof and smart contract is used to verify the availability of data between the data owner and the cloud service provider under the premise of protecting data privacy. Second, proxy reencryption technology is used to realize the secure sharing of data among authorized cloud service providers. In addition, data sharing transaction information between multiple parties and data hashes with digital signatures are stored on the blockchain to achieve public and verifiable data sharing information and data validity. Finally, the theoretical analysis of the scheme shows that the scheme meets the confidentiality requirements of security, integrity, and validity.
This paper presents a new short zero-knowledge argument for the range proof and arithmetic circuits without a trusted setup. In particular, it can achieve the shortest proof size of the proof system categories without a trusted setup. More specifically, when proving that a committed value is a positive integer less than 64 bits, except for negligible error in the 128-bit security parameter, the proof size is 576 bytes long, which is 85.7% the size of the previous shortest proof due to BĂŒnzet al.(Bulletproofs, IEEE Security and Privacy 2018). Similarly, circuit satisfiability can be proven with less communication overhead. Nevertheless, computational overheads in both proof generation and verification are comparable with those of Bulletproofs. Bulletproofs is established as one of the important privacy-enhancing technologies for a distributed ledger due to its trustless feature and short proof size. In particular, it has been implemented and optimized in various programming languages for practical usage by independent entities since it was proposed. The essence of Bulletproofs is based on the logarithmic inner product argument with no zero-knowledge. This paper revisits Bulletproofs from the viewpoint of the first sublinear zero-knowledge argument for linear algebra due to Groth (CRYPTO 2009) and then propose Bulletproofs+, an improved variety of Bulletproofs. The main component is thezero-knowledge weighted inner product argument (zk-WIP)which enables to reduce both the range proof and the arithmetic circuit proof. It already has zero-knowledge properties, there is no additional information when reducing zk-WIP, and it incurs a minimal transmission cost during the reduction process. Note that zk-WIP has all characteristics of the inner product argument, such as an aggregating range proof and batch verification; thus, Bulletproofs+ is superior to Bulletproofs in all aspects.
Quang Nhat Tran, Benjamin Turnbull, Min Wang, Jiankun Hu
Biometric authentication is, over time, becoming an indispensable complementary component to traditional authentication methods that use passwords and tokens. As a result, the research interest in the protection techniques for the biometric template has also grown considerably. In this paper, we present a light-weight AI-based biometric authentication that operates based on the binary representation of a biometric instance. In details, a binary classifier will be trained using the binary strings that represent the intraclass and interclass biometric subjects. The Support Vector Machine and Multi-layer Perceptron Neural Network are chosen as the classifier to evaluate the fingerprint-based and iris-based authentication capability. Afterward, the authenticated biometric string is fed to a hash function to produce a hash value, which is to be used in a Zero-Knowledge-Proof Protocol for the purpose of privacy preservation. In order to improve the recognition of the classifier, we devise a simple yet efficient strategy to enhance the discriminativeness of the binary strings and name it the Composite Features Retrieval. We evaluated the proposed method with the four publicly available fingerprint datasets FVC2002-DB1, FVC2002-DB2, FVC2002-DB3, and FVC2004-DB2 and the iris dataset UBIRISv1. The promising performance shows this method's capability.
Makaro is a logic puzzle with an objective to fill numbers into a rectangular grid to satisfy certain conditions. In 2018, Bultel et al. developed a physical zero-knowledge proof (ZKP) protocol for Makaro using a deck of cards, which allows a prover to physically convince a verifier that he/she knows a solution of the puzzle without revealing it. However, their protocol requires several identical copies of some cards, making it impractical as a deck of playing cards found in everyday life typically consists of all different cards. In this paper, we propose a new ZKP protocol for Makaro that can be implemented using a standard deck (a deck consisting of all different cards). Our protocol also uses asymptotically less cards than the protocol of Bultel et al. Most importantly, we develop a general method to encode a number with a sequence of all different cards. This allows us to securely compute several numerical functions using a standard deck, such as verifying that two given numbers are different and verifying that a number is the largest one among the given numbers.
In our day to day life, information security is a predominant topic. More specifically, (online) users expect to be asked for consent and that service providers handle their personal data with care and integrity. This urges the design of systems enforcing such expectations. The field of cryptography provides such powerful privacy-preserving tools. In this thesis, we consider one of those tools: pairings over elliptic curves. We strongly diverge from the general approach, i.e. taking already standardized curves regardless of the cryptographic protocol, and suggest curves satisfying chosen criteria. The given curves in this thesis have more efficient operations in the first pairing group than the curves from the literature. We follow by giving a group signature scheme, a primitive enabling the anonymity of its users among the group they belong to, designed using pairing over elliptic curves. This group signature is efficient when compared to the state-of-the-art, thanks to the very nice interaction between two randomizable signature schemes, allowing us to get rid of costly zero-knowledge proofs.
What is the funniest number in cryptography (Episode 2)? 0 [1]. The reason is that $\forall x, x \cdot 0 = 0$, i.e., the equation is satisfied no matter what $x$ is. We'll use zero to attack zero-knowledge proof (ZKP). In particular, we'll discuss a critical issue in a cutting-edge ZKP PLONK [2] C++ implementation which allows an attacker to create a forged proof that all verifiers will accept. We'll show how theory guides the attack's direction. In practice, the attack works like a charm and we'll show how the attack falls through a chain of perfectly aligned software cracks. In the same codebase, there is an independent critical ECDSA bug where (r, s) = (0, 0) is a valid signature for arbitrary keys and messages, but we won't discuss it further because it's a known ECDSA attack vector in the Google Wycheproof cryptanalysis project [3] that I worked on a few years ago. All bugs have been responsibly disclosed through the vendor's bug bounty program with total reward $\sim \$15,000$ (thank you).
Xuechun Mao, Lin You, Chengtang Cao, Gengran Hu · 5 authors
Biometric encryption, especially based on fingerprint, plays an important role in privacy protection and identity authentication. In this paper, we construct a privacy-preserving linkable ring signature scheme. In our scheme, we utilize a fuzzy symmetric encryption scheme called symmetric keyring encryption (SKE) to hide the secret key and use non-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) protocol to ensure that we do not leak any information about the message. Unlike the blind signature, we use NIZK protocol to cancel the interaction between the signer (the prover) and the verifier. The security proof shows that our scheme is secure under the random oracle model. Finally, we implement it on a personal computer and analyze the performance of the constructed scheme in practical terms. Based on the constructed scheme and demo, we give an anonymous cryptocurrency transaction model as well as mobile demonstration.
In privacy-preserving machine learning, it is less obvious to verify correct behavior of participants because they are not supposed to reveal their inputs in cleartext to other participants. It is hence important to make federated machine learning robust against data poisoning and related attacks. While input data can be related to a distributed ledger (blockchain), a less studied input is formed by the random sampling parties perform. In this paper, we describe strategies based on zero knowledge proofs to allow parties to prove they perform sampling (and other computations) correctly. We sketch a number of alternative ways to implement our idea and provide some preliminary experimental results.
Johan Colding, Stephan Barthel, Robert Ljung, Felix Eriksson · 5 authors
Climate change and the coupled loss of ecosystem services pose major collective action problems in that all individuals would benefit from better cooperation to address these problems but conflicting interests and/or incomplete knowledge discourage joint action. Adopting an inductive and multiâlayered approach, drawing upon the authorsâ previous research on urban commons, we here summarize key insights on environmentally oriented urban commons and elaborate on what role they have in instigating climateâproofing activities in urban areas. We deal with three types of urban commons, i.e., âurban green commons,â âcoworking spaces,â and âcommunity climate commons.â We describe how allotment gardens, community gardens, and other types of urban green commons contribute to environmental learning that may boost understanding of environmental issues and which constitute important learning arenas for climateâchange mitigation and adaptation. We also deal with the newly emerging phenomenon of coworking spaces that share many essential institutional attributes of urban commons and which can work for climateâchange mitigation through the benefits provided by a sharing economy and through reduction of domestic transportation and commuting distance. Community climate commons represent commons where local communities can mobilize together to create shared lowâcarbon assets and which hold the potential to empower certain segments and civil society groups so that they can have greater influence and ownership of the transformation of reaching netâzero carbon goals. We conclude this article by identifying some critical determinants for the upâscaling of environmentally oriented urban commons.
In response to the rapid growth of credit-investigation data, data redundancy among credit-investigation agencies, privacy leakages of credit-investigation data subjects, and data security risks have been reported. This study proposes a privacy-protection scheme for a credit-investigation system based on blockchain technology, which realizes the secure sharing of credit-investigation data among multiple entities such as credit-investigation users, credit-investigation agencies, and cloud service providers. This scheme is based on blockchain technology to solve the problem of islanding of credit-investigation data and is based on zero-knowledge-proof technology, which works by submitting a proof to the smart contract to achieve anonymous identity authentication, ensuring that the identity privacy of credit-investigation users is not disclosed; this scheme is also based on searchable-symmetric-encryption technology to realize the retrieval of the ciphertext of the credit-investigation data. A security analysis showed that this scheme guarantees the confidentiality, the availability, the tamper-proofability, and the ciphertext searchability of credit-investigation data, as well as the fairness and anonymity of identity authentication in the credit-investigation data query. An efficiency analysis showed that, compared with similar identity-authentication schemes, the proof key of this scheme is smaller, and the verification time is shorter. Compared with similar ciphertext-retrieval schemes, the time for this scheme to generate indexes and trapdoors and return search results is significantly shorter.
In the blockchain-based energy transaction scenario, the decentralization and transparency of the ledger will cause the usersâ transaction details to be disclosed to all participants. Attackers can use data mining algorithms to obtain and analyze usersâ private data, which will lead to the disclosure of transaction information. Simultaneously, it is also necessary for regulatory authorities to implement effective supervision of private data. Therefore, we propose a supervisable energy transaction data privacy protection scheme, which aims to trade off the supervision of energy transaction data by the supervisory authority and the privacy protection of transaction data. First, the concealment of the transaction amount is realized by Pedersen commitment and Bulletproof range proof. Next, the combination of ElGamal encryption and zero-knowledge proof technology ensures the authenticity of audit tickets, which allows regulators to achieve reliable supervision of the transaction privacy data without opening the commitment. Finally, the multibase decomposition method is used to improve the decryption efficiency of the supervisor. Experiments and security analysis show that the scheme can well satisfy transaction privacy and auditability.
Open access
Blockchain Technology Applications and Security
Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
Suguru is a paper and pencil puzzle invented by Naoki Inaba. The goal of the game is to fill a grid with numbers between 1 and 5 while respecting three simple constraints. We first prove the NP-completeness of Suguru puzzle. For this we design gadgets to encode the PLANAR-CIRCUIT-SAT in a Suguru grid. We then design a physical Zero-Knowledge Proof (ZKP) protocol for Suguru. This ZKP protocol allows a prover to prove that he knows a solution of a Suguru grid to a verifier without leaking any information on the solution. To construct such a physical ZKP protocol, we only rely on a few physical cards and adapted encoding. For a Suguru grid with n cells, we only use 5n+5 cards. Moreover, we prove the three classical security properties of a ZKP: completeness, extractability, and zero-knowledge.
With the fast boom of Internet of Medical Things (IoMT) devices and an increasing focus on personal health, personal health data are extensively collected by IoMT and stored as personal health records (PHRs). PHRs are frequently shared for accurate diagnosis, prognosis prediction, health advice consulting, etc. Since PHRs are highly private, the data-sharing process leads to wide-ranging concerns on privacy leakage and security compromise. Existing research has shown that the centralized systems, as the mainstream mode, are under the great risks. Motivated by this, we propose a consortium blockchain-based PHR management and sharing scheme, which is both security aware and privacy preserving. We adopt the interplanetary file system (IPFS) to store the PHR ciphertext of IoMT. Then, zero-knowledge proof can provide evidence for verifying keyword index authentication on blockchain. Moreover, the scheme jointly leverages modified attribute-based cryptographic primitives and tailor-made smart contracts to achieve secure search, privacy preservation, and personalized access control in IoMT scenarios. Security analysis is conducted to show that the designed protocols attain the expected design goals. This is followed by extensive evaluation results derived from real-world data sets, which demonstrate the superiority of the proposed scheme over current leading ones.
Rabimba Karanjai, Lei Xu, Zhimin Gao, Lin Chen · 6 authors
In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a privacy preserving event based UTXO (Unspent Transaction Output) transaction system. Unlike the existing approaches that often depend on smart contracts where digital assets are first locked in a vault, and then released according to event triggers, the event based transaction system encodes event outcome as part of the UTXO note and safeguards event privacy by shielding it with zero-knowledge proof based protocols such that associations between UTXO notes and events are hidden from the validators. Without relying on any triggering mechanism, the proposed transaction system separates event processing from the transaction processing where confidential event based UTXO notes (event based UTXOs or conditional UTXOs) can be transferred freely with full privacy in an asynchronous manner, only with their asset values conditional to the linked event outcomes. The main advantage of such design is that it enables free trade of event based digital assets and prevents the assets from being locked. We implemented the proposed transaction system by extending the Zerocoin data model and protocols. The system is implemented and evaluated using xJsnark.
The Dutch news cycle was mainly dominated by two topics this year: the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic and the formation of a new coalition government. The formation process followed the general elections of March and was accompanied by various scandals and leaked formation notes. After a record nine months, in January 2022, at last a coalition agreement was formedâbetween the exact four parties that had also formed the preceding coalition. In the meantime, many existing environmental challenges lingered on or were exacerbated, without much political action being taken to address them. There were some notable changes to the political discourse on some of these problems, however. The need to address climate change, for instance, was put high on the agenda of the formation talks after the intense rainfall and high water of July 2021 in the south of the Netherlands and neighbouring areas in Belgium and Germany. In a press conference in early August, prime minister Mark Rutte (at the time, demissionary, now prime minister again) stated that âthe Netherlands became seventh during the Olympic games. In the Olympic Games of the Climate, we can be number one tooâ (translated by author). It remains to be seen, of course, whether this ambitious spirit will be met with corresponding actions. Considering various political and socio-economic developments in 2021, there are reasons to be both optimistic as well as pessimistic, as will be discussed below. Home of the famous Urgenda ruling, the Netherlands will be known to many as a catalyst for climate litigation across the globe. At the national level, Urgenda has also paved the way for new legal challenges to follow suit. This year, the Dutch branch of the environmental non-governmental organization (NGO) Friends of the Earth (Milieudefensie) successfully sued Shell Plc for failing to reduce their emissions. The origins of the case lay in early April 2018, when Milieudefensie sent a notice letter to the chief executive officer of Shell to explain why it is of the position that the company, through its corporate activities and strategy, is breaching its duty of care by causing climate damage across the globe and undermining the ambitions of the Paris Agreement. A month later, Shell responded that it did not find Milieudefensieâs claims and demands justified. A lawsuit was then initiated by Milieudefensie, in which the environmental NGO was joined by six additional environmental NGOs and more than 17,000 co-plaintiffs from civil society. The case was heard by the District Court in The Hague in December 2020, with the ruling delivered on 26 May 2021 (ECLI:NL:RBDHA:2021, 5339). In its historic judgment, the District Court found that that Shell must reduce its global net carbon emissions by 45 percent by 2030 as compared to 2019 levels. In detailing its ruling, the court started from the basis that continued emissions will lead to dangerous and irreversible climate change, referring to the reports of the International Panel on Climate Change as well as national climate reports. The court subsequently found that Milieudefensie could bring a collective action pursuant to Book 3, section 305a of the Dutch Civil Code, which reads that a foundation or association with full legal capacity may institute legal proceedings for the protection of similar interests of other persons. Important to add here is that, although the court recognized that the âentire world population is served by curbing dangerous climate changeâ (para. 4.2.3), the diffuse manner and time in which climate risks manifest globally mean that the interests of current and future generations of the worldâs population cannot be bundled. The interests of current and future Dutch generations were considered sufficiently similar for a collective action to be taken by these environmental NGOs, however, meaning that Milieudefensie could take the case on behalf of Dutch residents. Milieudefensie had further requested Dutch law to be applicable on the actions of Shell on the basis of Article 7 of EC Regulation 864/2007 on the Law Applicable to Non-contractual Obligations. The court accepted this on the basis that the corporate policy of the Shell group âconstitutes an independent cause of the damage, which may contribute to environmental damage and imminent environmental damage with respect to Dutch residents and the inhabitants of the Wadden regionâ (para. 4.3.6.). In detailing its judgment, the court ruled that âthe CO2 emissions for which [Shell] can be held responsible by their nature pose a very serious threat, with a high risk of damage to Dutch residents and the inhabitants of the Wadden region and with serious human rights impactsâ (para. 4.4.54). Based on an unwritten standard of care pursuant to Book 6, section 162 of the Dutch Civil Code, the court ordered Shell to meet a reduction obligation of 45 percent by 2030, provisionally effective, meaning Shell must comply even though an appeal is still open. The case is groundbreaking in that it is the first time that a court of law found a private company to have a legal duty to reduce emissions. On top of that, the court ordered a concrete emission reduction target binding upon the company. Environmental groups across the world are now reflecting on what can be learned from this case, and how the case can be replicated in other jurisdictions and sectors. The Dutch court has helpfully published an English translation of this case that may be of assistance to such groups. It is important to emphasize here that the final word on this case has not been said. In fact, Shell has already confirmed it will appeal the judgment, with the companyâs chief executive officer noting that, although they agree that âurgent action is needed and we will accelerate our transition to net zero,â the company will appeal the ruling because âa court judgment, against a single company, is not effectiveâ (see 2021 media releases <http://www.shell.com>). Instead, the company advocates in its press release for clear, ambitious policies that can promote change across the entire energy system, and at a global level. Whether Shell thus far has played a constructive part in driving such changes to government policies can be debated, of course. Interestingly, this was not Milieudefensieâs only win against Shell in 2021. In fact, on 29 January, the Court of Appeal of The Hague ruled that Shellâs Nigerian subsidiary is liable for the consequences of two oil spills in Nigeria (ECLI:NLGDHA:2021, 132, 133, and 134). This case, brought by four Nigerian farmers and Milieudefensie, had been continuing for thirteen years and relates to oil leaks that took place between 2004â7. Shell disclaimed liability, stating that the oil spills had been caused by sabotage, as a result of which there would be no liability under Nigerian law. The Court of Appeal did not follow this reasoning. That a Dutch court could have jurisdiction and competence to judge compliance with Nigerian law had been decided in an earlier ruling in 2015, due to the fact that the parent company of the Nigerian subsidiary was based in the Netherlands (ECLI:NL:GHDHA:2015, 3586, 3587 and 3588). A final note regarding climate litigation relates to the impact of climate litigation in practice. In 2015, the District Court of The Hague ruled that the Dutch State would have to ensure that carbon dioxide emissions are reduced by 25 percent in 2020 as compared to 1990. Even though the government decided to (unsuccessfully) appeal this judgment all the way up to the Supreme Court level, the fact remains that the emission reduction requirement was binding from the start. In 2021, there were no signs that the state had lived up to the Courtâs judgment. As a consequence, Urgenda decided to initiate new proceedings to request the judge to impose a penalty payment on the state to secure compliance with the judgment. In early 2022, final emissions data were published by the Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency, which showed that in 2020, 25.5 percent less carbon dioxide had been emitted, compared to 1990. The most recent data shows that in 2021, however, emissions had gone up again, towards a 23.9 percent reduction compared to 1990. It is important to note here that the original reduction requirement relates to the absolute minimum needed from industrialized countries to remain below a temperature rise of two degrees Celsius (not 1.5 degrees Celsius). As it turns out, not even a court judgment has thus far incentivized the Dutch government to indeed meet this minimum reduction. Besides being problematic from a climate action perspective, such non-action also threatens the functioning of the rule of lawârechtsstaat, in the Dutch contextâin which governments are bound by the law and must respect the judgments of independent judges. In both respects, it seems crucial to remain vigilant of the countryâs commitment to climate action in the years to come, ensuring that the Urgenda judgment is in fact respected. In the previous report on the Netherlands in this Yearbook, Lorenzo Squintani explained in detail how the country entered a societal and political gridlock when the Dutch Council of State, in its judgment of 2019, found the Dutch Programmatic Approach to nitrogen oxides to be incompatible with EU nature conservation law. Squintani described in his report how the âsearch for a solution to the low quality of soil in Natura 2000 sites is greatly overshadowed by the search for a solution for economic interestsâ (at 382). This observation, in many ways, holds true today, and an unmistakable amount of scientific evidence shows that excessive nitrogen emissions remain a core threat to biodiversity and nature values in the country. Over the course of the past year, measures were initiated that may hopefully help change this course, however. First, on 1 July, the Act on nitrogen reduction and nature improvement (stikstofreductie en natuurverbetering) entered into force, amending existing nature legislation. The Act sets a time-based result obligation for ensuring that protected nature sites have a healthy nitrogen dispositionânamely, 40 percent of the coverage of such sites in 2025, 50 percent in 2030, and 74 percent in 2035. In addition, the Act requires the establishment of a governmental program with concrete measures and intermediary goals to realize these binding targets, accompanied by monitoring requirements. In the coalition agreement, presented on 15 December, a total amount of âŹ25 billion was made available to address the nitrogen crisis in the period until 2035, of which âŹ20 billion must have been spent by the year 2030. For spending these funds, the national government puts the responsibility at the provincial level. The aim here is to develop more of a locality-based approach, with the twelve provinces being required to develop detailed plans on how nitrogen emissions will be addressed per individual area within their province. The provinces must present their plans in 2023âwhich may then allow for further collaboration and coordination between themâafter which, the national government will evaluate these plans and provide the funding. Although the chosen approach may provide provinces with the necessary flexibility to adapt measures to their local circumstances, the success of this approach is very much dependent on the commitment of individual provincesâwhich has proven to be fiddly in the past. Besides the stipulated budget, the exact manner in which the nitrogen crisis will be addressed is thus still very much unclear. In the agricultural domainâthe main source of nitrogen emissions in the countryâthe focus still seems to be on financial instruments to incentivize a shift towards circular agriculture with drastically reduced nitrogen outputs. Farms with high emissions that cannot reduce their emissions and are located close to protected nature sites may be offered a government buyout orâalthough this is not confirmedâmay be forced to sell their farm. Such forced buyouts, however, are time-consuming and expensive, on top of being highly politically sensitive, particularly in light of the large-scale farmer protests of 2019â20. As such, this does not seem to be the preferred government option. Besides measures flowing from the Nitrogen Act, the Dutch draft National Strategic Plan for the Common Agricultural Policy 2023â7 is another instrument that may play an important role in addressing nitrogen emissions. Although the word ânitrogenâ occurs no less than sixty-three times on the in the total 107 pages of this plan, the actual measures that may be used are not made very concrete. Various generic types of interventions are mentioned that may contribute to reducing nitrogen emissions, including the use of eco-schemes, agri-environmental subsidies, enhancing cooperation, and promoting knowledge and information distributing (at 30). In addition, the plan seeks to commit funds towards the strengthening of cooperation between farmers and other area partners, so that problems can addressed at a landscape scale. This includes subsidies for the development of area plans that stipulate concrete measures per area, including the extensification of high emission farms located close to nitrogen-sensitive Natura 2000 sites. Overall, it remains to be seen to what extent instruments of the policy will be employed to help meet the objectives of the new Nitrogen Act. Despite these new measures, over the course of the year, several new cases were brought (and won) by environmental NGOs to enforce rules on nitrogen, highlighting continued faults in the governmentâs nitrogen approach and particularly the calculation methods of nitrogen permits (see, for example, ECLI:NL:RBOBR:2021, 6389). The only real way to change this course seems to be to for the (provincial) government to stop searching for paper solutions and start addressing the various existing environmental challenges in a holistic, non-isolated manner. This also appears as a central plank in the coalition agreement, in which it is stipulated that nitrogen measures should also help, for instance, to address biodiversity declines and improve water quality. It is not a stretch to say that the Netherlands can rightly anticipate new (legal) challenges about that second aspect, as it is increasingly becoming clear that the Netherlands are nowhere near on track to meet the binding targets of EC Directive 2000/60 Establishing a Framework for Community Action in the Field of Water Policy. A more holistic approach to law and policy making, in which environmental and other societal challenges are no longer dealt with in isolation, will be of key importance here. This year also presented several interesting rulings by the Dutch Council of State on the application of environmental democracy rights flowing from the Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decision-making and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters (Aarhus Convention). The point of departure for us here is a ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on Stichting Varkens in Nood and Others, of 14 January 2021 (C-826/18). In brief, this case dealt with a request for a preliminary reference submitted by the Dutch District Court of Limburg, seeking clarification on Articles 6 and 9(2) of the Aarhus Convention. These provisions respectively provide that a decision to authorize environmental activities must be subject to a public participation procedure, and that there should be a right of access to justice to subsequently challenge such decisions. In the Netherlands, any person can participate in a decision-making procedure by making a submission on a draft decision. There is no obligation for public actors to adapt draft decisions based on submissions received. In Article 6:13 of the Dutch General Administrative Law Act, then, it is stipulated that only interested parties that have submitted observations on a draft decision during the preparatory procedure may subsequently challenge the adopted decision in court. Exceptions to this rule are possible when an applicant is able show that this requirement could not reasonably be metâfor instance, because a draft decision was not publicized. In general, however, the rule stands that, without having participated in the decision-making process by making a (written or oral) submission, there is no subsequent access to justice. In the preliminary ruling, the CJEU found that this requirement is not in line with the Aarhus Convention. Instead, interested parties should have the right to appeal a decision, even if they have not made submissions in the preparatory phase. In addition, the court ruled that people who are deemed interested parties for the purpose of making submissions should also, subsequently, be allowed to appeal a decision before a court of law. If the Netherlands thus allows any person to make submissions, it should also allow any person to subsequently challenge an adopted decision in court. On 15 April, the Dutch Council of State subsequently ruled that, indeed, interested parties can also appeal decisions if they have not made submissions. For environmental NGOs and other potential applicants, this may be quite the relief. As recent empirical work on the application of the Aarhus Convention shows, the submission requirement can be relatively burdensome in practice, especially for smaller environmental groups. On paper, this submission requirement serves to improve the decision-making process by ensuring that different considerations and perspectives could be considered before a final decision comes to being. In practice, it seems that submissions hardly led to decisions being adapted in the preparatory phase. As such, the main reason for making submissions was purely to be able to challenge a decision, if need be, later. After these judgments, it is now the legislatorâs turn to decide how to incorporate these rulings into domestic law, ensuring compliance with the Aarhus Convention. With a focus on the domains of climate, nature, and environmental democracy, this report has reasons to be optimistic as well as regarding the development of environmental law in the there are several to a close on for the future of environmental law in the country. In to climate in both Shell cases that were the country of of the parent company played an important role in the It can be that can climate litigation proceedings if they are based in countries with less climate or less Whether due to with Dutch climate cases or other at the of 2021, Shell decided to its to A environmental NGO has already that it will bring an action against the of Shell for failing to develop company in line with the Paris in breaching their under the law. In the it should clear whether climate litigation will branch also in this new or In to nitrogen, then, when the new coalition government was presented on January 2022, the a new that the is in the the minister of nature and The of this new minister is to nature and in a by As the new Act on nitrogen reduction and nature improvement is being and the of to addressing excessive nitrogen emissions are put to it can only be that the environmental challenges at play will be as environmental democracy, it is now thus the legislatorâs turn to ensure that Dutch law is in line with the new line of case law discussed it is also in the that, to up to the ambitions of the Aarhus not only changes also changes in the way that public actors environmental democracy in are As has also been in previous year much work remains to be in this
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