Revealed: The law you’ve never heard of that stops Britain building – and it’s not even British
Downing Street wants to stop green activists from using a little-known international law to tie up major infrastructure projects in the courts using millions of pounds of taxpayer cash, Sky News can reveal.
An obscure international agreement known as the Aarhus Convention, named after Denmark’s second city, is delaying some of the biggest industrial projects in the country.
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Around 80 cases a year are brought under the convention, Sky News has learned, which caps the costs of anyone bringing a case at £5,000 if the case is brought by an individual or £10,000 by organisations.
If this convention did not exist, costs would otherwise be awarded against a claimant for the losing side’s legal fees in the event the claimant is unsuccessful – and could potentially run into the hundreds of thousands or even higher.
This means it’s costing the taxpayer millions every year in legal fees – on top of what critics say is hundreds of millions of additional costs for developers as projects go through the courts.
Developers want to build a carbon capture and storage facility on a gas-fired power station on Teesside’s coastline
The international law was brought in to allow those without deep pockets to challenge companies and governments they believe are breaking green laws.
However, it is causing big frustration in government.
Even some in the environmental movement believe it is being abused.
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Modern lawfare
Campaigners who use it, however, say it is a vital tool to hold ministers to their green targets.
Many of the cases are brought by specialist human rights and environmentalist law firm Leigh Day, whose lead environmental lawyer told Sky News the convention “is extremely important to every claimant who’s bringing an environmental case in this country”.
These cases leave the taxpayer facing bills of millions of pounds, and developer costs reaching into the hundreds of millions because of delays to building work.
A source in Number 10 said the prime minister is personally affronted by this sort of use of the law, and it has been labelled “lawfare” – a derogatory term which means using the legal system to the detriment of one’s opponents.
Andrew Boswell was identified by the prime minister as one of the country’s ‘NIMBYs and zealots’ because of his legal challenges
This week, a computer scientist and former Norfolk councillor is in court once more challenging the first carbon capture storage project on a gas-fired power station, which is due to be built on Teesside.
Andrew Boswell was the subject of a personal attack by the prime minister in the Daily Mail, who identified him as one of the “NIMBYs and zealots” for his legal challenges – including road schemes.
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Sky News took Mr Boswell to the site where building of the project, which is majority-run by BP, is due to take place once the court challenges are complete.
He said he was challenging the project on the grounds it would break the government’s promises to adhere to carbon budgets under the Climate Change Act.
“People would be very surprised to hear they’re going to build a gas-fired power station here,” he said.
“They are going to put carbon capture and storage on it. But our analysis is that actually is not a good solution environmentally.”
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‘We are holding the government to account’
Mr Boswell has so far lost the cases he has brought, and Sky News understands the delays to this project are costing £100m every three months.
Asked if this made him reconsider his decision to challenge the project, he said: “We are holding the government to account.”
Cases brought under the Aarhus Convention leave developers facing bills of hundreds of millions of pounds because of delays
“The point is we have laws in this country, and we have a Climate Change Act, which we’re legally enshrined to meet, and government ministers have been making decisions which aren’t consistent with that,” he added.
He said he and other environmental activists would not be able to bring such cases in the event that the Aarhus convention did not get the taxpayer to pay most of the costs against them in the event the case is unsuccessful.
“It would be very difficult for individual campaigners like myself and also the environmental groups and other groups who wish to go to court,” he told me.
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Projects of ‘huge significance’ being challenged
The law firm used by Mr Boswell, Leigh Day, brings several cases each year using the Aarhus Convention.
Carol Day from legal firm Leigh Day said around 80 cases a year are brought under the convention
Carol Day, from Leigh Day, said about 80 cases were brought to the High Court per year on environmental issues.
“That doesn’t sound like very many, but they are mostly very important projects of huge significance,” she said, with “enormous implications for the protection of the environment”.
A series of cases have been brought under the Aarhus Convention.
Mr Boswell himself took his case against proposed improvements to the A47 in Norfolk by National Highways all the way up to the Supreme Court.
In 2021, the Supreme Court overturned a block on Heathrow’s expansion, a challenge brought under the convention capping the losers’ costs at £10,000.
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Activists point to the successful challenge by Sarah Finch.
Last year the challenge, by the self-employed writer resulted in a Supreme Court ruling that carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels should be factored into planning decisions.
The ruling has scotched an oil well near Gatwick and another near the village of Biscathorpe in Lincolnshire. The challenge would not have happened unless she knew her costs would be capped if she had lost.
Asked about whether it was right that millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money are going to lawyers fighting cases that effectively delay big infrastructure projects for years, she insisted there would be “no challenge” if the projects “were made lawfully”.
Teesside mayor Ben Houchen on the site where Teesworks is supposed to be built
‘We can’t get things done’
Ben Houchen, the Tory Teesside mayor, whose Teesworks site will host the carbon capture and storage gas power station, said the system must change.
“The system has gone so far,” he said, with “too many challenges”.
“We can’t get things done in this country. We have a democratically elected government that wants to deliver growth. It wants to deliver these types of investments. I’ve been elected on the promise of delivering these investments.”
Mr Houchen called for “fundamental reform” to help “stop these activists from being able to stop any sort of economic growth and investment that creates jobs”.
It appears Sir Keir Starmer agrees in principle. Whether he can reform an international treaty remains to be seen.
US Senator Elizabeth Warren warned that if President Donald Trump eventually moves to fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, it could undermine investor confidence in the integrity of US capital markets and trigger a financial crash.
During an appearance on CNBC, the Massachusetts Senator said the President does not have the legal authority to remove Powell from his position. Moreover, removing Powell would weaken the financial infrastructure of the US, Warren added:
“If Chairman Powell can be fired by the President of the United States, it will crash the markets. The infrastructure that keeps this stock market strong and, therefore, a big part of our economy strong, and a big part of the world economy strong, is the idea that the big pieces move independently of politics.”
“If interest rates in the United States are subject to a president who just wants to wave his magic wand, this doesn’t distinguish us from any other two-bit dictatorship,” Warren continued.
President Trump has repeatedly called for Powell’s termination, citing the chairman’s hesitancy to lower interest rates. Lower interest rates are usually considered a positive catalyst for risk-on asset prices, including cryptocurrencies, and could reverse the market downturn brought on by the trade war and current macroeconomic pressures.
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Trump’s feud with the Federal Reserve chairman
Trump criticized Powell for not cutting interest rates and called for his termination again in an April 17 Truth Social post, which inflamed speculation that he would follow through on threats and find a way to remove the chairman.
Senator Rick Scott echoed Trump’s calls to remove Powell. “It’s time to clean house of everyone working at the Federal Reserve who isn’t on board with helping the American people and fighting for their best interests,” Scott wrote in an opinion piece published on Fox News.
The Trump administration has repeatedly stated that lowering interest rates is a top priority. Market analyst and investor Anthony Pompliano recently speculated that Trump deliberately crashed financial markets to force lower interest rates.
At the time, Pompliano cited a reduction in the yield of the 10-year US Treasury Bond to just 4%. The 10-year bond yield has climbed back up to 4.3% since then.
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Crypto investor sentiment took another significant hit this week after Mantra’s OM token collapsed by over 90% within hours on Sunday, April 13, triggering knee-jerk comparisons to previous black swan events such as the Terra-Luna collapse.
Elsewhere, Coinbase’s report for institutional investors added to concerns by highlighting that cryptocurrencies may be in a bear market until a recovery occurs in the third quarter of 2025.
Mantra OM token crash exposes “critical” liquidity issues in crypto
Mantra’s recent token collapse highlights an issue within the crypto industry of fluctuating weekend liquidity levels creating additional downside volatility, which may have exacerbated the token’s crash.
The Mantra (OM) token’s price collapsed by over 90% on Sunday, April 13, from roughly $6.30 to below $0.50, triggering market manipulation allegations among disillusioned investors, Cointelegraph reported.
While blockchain analysts are still piecing together the reasons behind the OM collapse, the event highlights some crucial issues for the crypto industry, according to Gracy Chen, CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Bitget.
“The OM token crash exposed several critical issues that we are seeing not just in OM, but also as an industry,” Chen said during Cointelegraph’s Chainreaction daily X show, adding:
“When it’s a token that’s too concentrated, the wealth concentration and the very opaque governance, together with sudden exchange inflows and outflows, […] combined with the forced liquidation during very low liquidity hours in our industry, created the big drop off.”
Crypto in a bear market, rebound likely in Q3 — Coinbase
A monthly market review by publicly traded US-based crypto exchange Coinbase shows that while the crypto market has contracted, it appears to be gearing up for a better quarter.
According to Coinbase’s April 15 monthly outlook for institutional investors, the altcoin market cap shrank by 41% from its December 2024 highs of $1.6 trillion to $950 billion by mid-April. BTC Tools data shows that this metric touched a low of $906.9 billion on April 9 and stood at $976.9 billion at the time of writing.
Venture capital funding to crypto projects has reportedly decreased by 50%–60% from 2021–22. In the report, Coinbase’s global head of research, David Duong, highlighted that a new crypto winter may be upon us.
“Several converging signals may be pointing to the start of a new ‘crypto winter’ as some extreme negative sentiment has set in due to the onset of global tariffs and the potential for further escalations,” he said.
Manta founder details attempted Zoom hack by Lazarus that used very real “legit faces”
Manta Network co-founder Kenny Li said he was targeted by a sophisticated phishing attack on Zoom that used live recordings of familiar people in an attempt to lure him to download malware.
The meeting seemed real with the impersonated person’s camera on, but the lack of sound and a suspicious prompt to download a script raised red flags, Li said in an April 17 X post.
“I could see their legit faces. Everything looked very real. But I couldn’t hear them. It said my Zoom needs an update. But it asked me to download a script file. I immediately left.”
Li then asked the impersonator to verify themselves over a Telegram call, however, they didn’t comply and proceeded to erase all messages and block him soon after.
Li said the North Korean state-backed Lazarus Group was behind the attack.
The Manta Network co-founder managed to screenshot his conversation with the attacker before the messages were deleted, during which Li initially suggested moving the call over to Google Meet.
Speaking with Cointelegraph, Li said he believed the live shots used in the video call were taken from past recordings of real team members.
“It didn’t seem AI-generated. The quality looked like what a typical webcam quality looks like.”
AI tokens, memecoins dominate crypto narratives in Q1 2025: CoinGecko
The cryptocurrency market is still recycling old narratives, with few new trends yet to emerge and replace the leading themes in the first quarter of 2025.
Artificial intelligence tokens and memecoins were the dominant crypto narratives in the first quarter of 2025, accounting for 62.8% of investor interest, according to a quarterly research report by CoinGecko. AI tokens captured 35.7% of global investor interest, overtaking the 27.1% share of memecoins, which remained in second place.
Out of the top 20 crypto narratives of the quarter, six were memecoin categories while five were AI-related.
“Seems like we have yet to see another new narrative emerge and we are still following past quarters’ trends,” said Bobby Ong, the co-founder and chief operating officer of CoinGecko, in an April 17 X post. “I guess we are all tired from the same old trends repeating themselves.”
Crypto lending down 43% from 2021 highs, DeFi borrowing surges 959%
The crypto lending market’s size remains significantly down from its $64 billion high, but decentralized finance (DeFi) borrowing has made a more than 900% recovery from bear market lows.
Crypto lending enables borrowers to use their crypto holdings as collateral to obtain crypto or fiat loans, while lenders can use their holdings to generate interest.
The crypto lending market was down over 43%, from its all-time high of $64.4 billion in 2021 to $36.5 billion at the end of the fourth quarter of 2024, according to a Galaxy Digital research report published on April 14.
“The decline can be attributed to the decimation of lenders on the supply side and funds, individuals, and corporate entities on the demand side,” according to Zack Pokorny, research associate at Galaxy Digital.
The decline in the crypto lending market started in 2022 when centralized finance (CeFi) lenders Genesis, Celsius Network, BlockFi and Voyager filed for bankruptcy within two years as crypto valuations fell.
Their collective downfall led to an estimated 78% collapse in the size of the lending market, with CeFi lending losing 82% of its open borrows, according to the report.
DeFi market overview
According to data from Cointelegraph Markets Pro and TradingView, most of the 100 largest cryptocurrencies by market capitalization ended the week in the green.
Decentralized exchange (DEX) Raydium’s (RAY) token rose over 26% as the week’s biggest gainer, followed by the AB blockchain (AB) utility token, up over 19% on the weekly chart.
Thanks for reading our summary of this week’s most impactful DeFi developments. Join us next Friday for more stories, insights and education regarding this dynamically advancing space.
Tokenized stocks are on track to exceed $1 trillion in market capitalization in the coming years as adoption accelerates, two industry executives said at the TokenizeThis conference in New York.
The total addressable market for tokenized stocks — a type of tokenized real-world asset (RWA) — is difficult to project but is “definitely a bigger trillion-dollar market,” Arnab Naskar, STOKR’s CEO, said during an April 16 panel at the event.
In 2025, demand for the instruments has “exploded” from institutions ranging from Web3 wallets to neobanks to traditional financial services firms, according to Anna Wroblewska, Dinari’s Chief Business Officer.
“We’ve had an enormous influx of demand from a much broader scope of potential partners than you might even imagine […] it’s actually been really interesting,” Wroblewska said.
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Small but growing market share
As of April 18, tokenized stocks comprise around $350 million in cumulative market capitalization, according to data from RWA.xyz.
This represents only a sliver of the total RWA market, which is worth upward of $18 billion, the data shows.
But this could change as tokenized stocks capture a growing share of the US equities market, Wroblewska said. The US stock market has an aggregate value of more than $50 trillion, according to Siblis Research.
There is a “huge appetite for US public equities… even individual investors globally want exposure to US capital markets. Tokenization makes it fast and cheap,” Wroblewska said.
She added that tokenized US Treasury Bills are already in high demand for similar reasons. They currently comprise nearly $6 billion in total market cap, RWA.xyz data shows.
Meanwhile, Coinbase is considering making tokenized shares of its stock available on Base, its Ethereum layer-2 network.
Collectively, tokenized RWAs represent a $30 trillion market opportunity globally, Colin Butler, Movement Labs’ global head of institutional capital, told Cointelegraph in an August interview.
“Tokenization will become a mirror of the market. If the user experience is better, faster, and cheaper, people will default to tokenized assets,” Wroblewska said.
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