Our organization was founded on March 24, 1994 as “Ekopravo – Lviv” Charitable Foundation. Later, we transformed into International Charitable Organization “Environment-People-Law” and became EPL.
Our goal is to protect the environment and the rights of citizens to a safe environment in Ukraine using law tools.
At the beginning of our activity, we had three lawyers headed by Svitlana Kravchenko. Today, EPL is a team of lawyers and environmental scientists, like-minded people from other partner organizations.
For 30 years of our work, we have provided thousands of legal consultations, worked on a large number of litigation cases.
Unfortunately, the reality is that the rule of law in Ukraine is being established very slowly…
But we do not fall into despair! On the contrary, difficulties make us stronger! And we are proud that we are achieving success in certain areas.
For the strategic case “the Danube – the Black Sea” we won the most prestigious global environmental award – the Goldman Prize. Currently the largest world organizations cooperate with us: UN, IUCN, ELAW, EEB…
Among other things our achievements include the following: winning the first environmental court case in the European Court of Human Rights, making the Aarhus Convention work in Ukraine…
10 years ago, we started working as one of the first think tanks in the area of environmental policy and prepared more than 200 policy papers on the formation of modern European environmental policy.
Results of the analytical work formed the basis for dozens of state documents. EPL was part of the groups of developers of laws on environmental impact assessment and strategic environmental assessment, on waste management and others.
In total, over 30 years of its work, EPL handled 717 court cases. We provided 7,852 consultations, commented on 243 draft laws and by-laws. EPL organized 178 events. We have produced 91 publications …
The International Union for Conservation of Nature recognized EPL to be the Center of Legal Excellence, EPL regulalry joins international environmental initiatives…
Today, we are making every possible effort to pass the laws on state environmental control, on the Emerald Network, on increasing responsibility for violations of environmental protection legislation and harming the environment…
The organization’s efforts are also focused on drawing attention to Russian crimes against the Ukrainian environment. We believe that the aggressor state will be punished and will compensate for the damage!
Another direction of our work is the struggle to preserve the pearls of the Ukrainian Carpathians – the Svydovets and Borzhava mountain ranges… There is really a lot of work to do!
