| Summary: | The EU's ambition to achieve climate neutrality by 2050, alongside its pursuit of strategic autonomy in critical raw materials such as lithium, often finds itself at odds with its own environmental regulations, binding on both member states and candidates. Serbia – a candidate for EU membership and a country possessing substantial lithium deposits – epitomises this inherent tension, enabling an analysis that extends beyond the confines of a single national jurisdiction. The paper contends that the feasibility of lithium extraction in the EU candidate countries entails the subordination of the Union's legal standards to its overarching economic and strategic imperatives.
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