Earlier EPL informed that in November 2012 the appellate court upheld a lower court decision from October 2011 ordering the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources of Ukraine to post full texts of all EIA decision taken over three years.
In 2011 the administrative court met Environmental-People-Law’s (EPL) claim and declared that failure of the Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources to publish final EIA decisions was illegal. EPL for many years has strived to improve public access to environmental information among other means by virtue of increasing the amount of the information spread via official governmental web-pages on the Internet. Despite the provisions of the Aarhus Convention and the relevant domestic legislation the Ministry has always been reluctant to facilitate public access to EIA documentation and decisions. The only possibility to get a final EIA decision was to file a request. In many cases such requests were illegally denied on various grounds.
In October 2010, EPL filed a lawsuit alleging that failure to actively disclose all the final EIA decisions by the Ministry violates international obligations of Ukraine under the Aarhus Convention as well as Ukrainian laws and asking the court to oblige the Ministry to publish all EIA decisions issued since the beginning of 2009. In October 2011, the court rendered its decision obliging the Ministry to post full texts of one thousand and three hundred decisions on its official web page. In November 2012, the appellate court upheld the decision of the lower court, which finally came into force.
As of today the Ministry has posted on its web-page full texts of the decisions taken in 2009, 2010. It is still working on the document for 2011. From now on, every person has access to all governmental decisions all over Ukraine, by which environmentally hazardous activities were permitted. This is a huge step toward openness and accountability of the government in terms of environmental safety.
For further information, please contact Yelyzaveta Aleksyeyeva at
+38 032 225 76 82
e.aleksyeyeva@.epl.org.ua
