The investigation of potentially contaminated sites and the management of contaminated sites should respect the polluter pays, precautionary and proportionality principles. Member States should aim to identify the polluter and should establish a hierarchy of responsibility or decision chain of responsibility, to determine the natural or legal person responsible for bearing the costs of the soil investigation, risk assessment and the risk reduction measures. It should be possible for the Member States to decide to further distinguish between historically and newly contaminated sites and to apply a more stringent approach for contamination caused after a certain date of reference. In the case of contaminated sites for which it is not possible to identify the natural or legal person responsible for the contamination, Member States should be able to use financial instruments and Union funding programmes in order to carry out the obligations regarding soil investigation and soil remediation.
Text as published in the Official Journal, reproduced verbatim (including any typographical quirks of the source). For the authentic version, see EUR-Lex.
