Under the cover of implementation of the Aarhus Convention Ukraine legislatively straitens access to environmental information
In 2005 the chamber of internationally recognized lawyers (members of the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee) came to a conclusion that Ukraine violates requirements of the Aarhus Convention regarding access to environmental information and public participation in environmental decision-making. Since then, being facilitated by the Committee, Ukraine has been developing new legislation aiming to bring Ukraine in compliance with the Convention. The Draft Law “On amending the Law of Ukraine “On environmental protection” regarding the definition of environmental information” is claimed to integrate the definition of environmental information given by the Convention into domestic legislation. And it really does it, but only to some extent.
The paragraph 1 of the draft law proposes to get rid of legislative equality of the terms “environmental information” and “information on the state of the environment”. If the draft is enacted as proposed, it will diminish a number of domestic guarantees on the openness of environmental information. As for today domestic regulations on prohibition of making environmental information secret use the definition “information on the state of the environment”, but due to legislative equality of this term with the other one ― “environmental information” - these guarantees cover all the spectrum of the information listed in Article 2 of the Convention. Article 2 of the Convention gives a definition of environmental information. Information on the state of the environment is listed as one of the types of information designated as environmental by the Convention. If the draft law is enacted as proposed, the domestic prohibition on making information secret will cover only information on the state of the environment in its literal meaning instead of all of the environmental information as it is meant by the Convention.
In October of 2009, EPL commented on this defect of the draft law to the Ministry of the Environmental Protection – the authority responsible for the drafting. The comments were not taken into account. Recently EPL has submitted its legal assessment of the draft law to the Aarhus Convention Compliance Committee which on its forthcoming meeting in March will consider proposed draft law in terms of its compliance with the conventional provisions on the access to environmental information.
Follow the most recent information on implementation of the Aarhus Convention by Ukraine on EPL’s web-page, www.epl.org.ua
For details contact
Elizaveta Alexeyeva, senior lawyer
liza@uoregon.edu; epac@mail.lviv.ua
tel. (032) 243 – 38- 88
