With a legislative “ambush” – through transitional and final provisions of a completely different law, at the end of the 49th National Assembly, GERB and DPS tried to block the mechanisms for preventive protection of health and nature provided for in the Environmental Protection Act.
“We can’t boast of much progress in conservation legislation in the outgoing Parliament, but it would be far worse to see such regression and lawlessness. We will not allow the attack on health and nature to succeed,” said Daniela Bozhinova, Member of Parliament from Burgas, on the occasion of the introduced changes. (PP-DB) and co-chairman of the Green Movement.
On Sunday, April 14, in Sofia and the country, outraged citizens and environmental protection organizations organized protests against the proposed legislative changes
The changes that GERB and DPS are trying to push have the Investment Promotion Law as their rocket carrier and were introduced between two of its readings. They have nothing to do with the changes to which the Investment Promotion Act is open. The scandalous proposals refer to the assessment of the impact of investment intentions on the environment (in ZOOS).
The term is proposed for issuing an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) to be reduced by half, and for large and complex projects, such as projects of national importance – highways, nuclear power plants, etc.
In case of delay, the principle of tacit consent should be accepted only for these objects. Current EIAs should be extended for another 10 years, and newly issued EIAs should be valid for a period of 15 years. To permanently remove the possibility of appealing the EIA at the second instance.
Implementing such changes will return us to pre-civilization times and eliminate important human rights of each and every one of us: the right to information about possible impacts on our living environment – in the short deadlines for processing investment proposals, there will be no time for notification, the right to participate – there will be even less time for public discussion, and even after we have no information, what will we discuss
Abolishing the two-tiered process will deprive us of the right to environmental justice. All these rights are a conquest of the modernizing and democratizing Bulgaria, they are internationally guaranteed by the so-called Aarhus Convention, which we have signed and ratified.
The amendments are contrary to the law of the European Union, which requires strengthening, not weakening, of environmental protection (Article 3, Paragraph 3 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) and Article 191 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU). Under the plausible pretext of improving administrative procedures, GERB and DPS want huge projects to be approved with tacit consent, that is, only with the expiration of a certain period and without any evaluation by the competent environmental authority.
The tripling of the period of validity of EIA decisions from 5 to 15 years grossly contradicts the meaning of the Environmental Impact Assessment procedures, which should assess all risks to the environment and human health at a certain point in time.
The proposal to resurrect EIA decisions, which have lost legal effect under the current law, is particularly striking. In this way, GERB and DPS are trying to bring back to implementation even the abandoned and lost funding project for the incineration of 180,000 tons of waste in Sofia, as well as the expired EIA of a key section of the Struma highway, continuing their validity, otherwise expired according to the current law . Obviously, these proposals contradict fundamental legal principles and aim to benefit certain economic interests.
No less scandalous are the proposed changes in the Territorial Planning Act, where the current procedures, including public participation, are replaced by orders of the regional governor to unilaterally change the general development plans for the purposes of objects of national importance.
The proposed changes are expected to go to the floor of parliament in April for a vote. According to “Green Movement”, importers should withdraw them, as they are radically different removes the practical meaning of environmental impact assessments and, in essence, preventive control for human health and nature protection.
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