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Gov't: Slovakia Won't Lose EU Funds, We'll Fix it on Friday
Wednesday 03 February 2010 Zoom in | Print page
Bratislava, February 3 (TASR) – Slovak Government is to hold an extraordinary session on Friday to deal with the amendments to the law on Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) following the directive of the European Commission (EC), Brano Ondrus, head of the Government Office press department, said after the Government session Wednesday.
Ondrus explained that if the amendments are okayed by the Government on Friday, the Parliament could deal with them in a fast-tracked procedure as early as next week. "We're discussing this issue with Brussels. In January, a working group was created under the remit of the Environment Ministry, consisting of representatives from several ministries, Foreign Affairs Ministry included," explained Ondrus. The task of this group was to prepare the legislative amendments that will suit the EC's demands.
In connection with this, Ondrus pointed out that the Government will do its utmost to ensure that Slovakia will not lose money from the EU funds on offer due to the current legislative status. "The Government will master the situation so that there will be no stoppage in the drawing of EU funds," he said.
According to the information brought by the weekly Trend on Tuesday, the reason why Slovakia could lose part of the money from the funds is the extraordinary legislative measures taken to usher in the fast-tracked construction of motorways through private-public partnership (PPP) funding passed in 2007. Based on the content of the letter sent from European Commission Regional Policy Directorate-General Dirk Ahner to Slovak ambassador to the EU Ivan Korcok, the weekly claims the EU funds are endangered due to the preferring of motorway construction over citizens' rights to co-decide over the environment they live in, which is at odds with the EU legislation.
In early 2007, the Slovak Parliament limited citizens' rights when it steamrolled through the legislation for motorway constructions, in the EC's view.
One of the measures was a legislative amendment to the assessment of environmental impact, according to which the public – as represented by the Parliament – has lost the right to participate in the process of okaying motorways. The status of 'public' in this decision-making process was reduced to “present subject”, which means that the authorities responsible for the decision-making are not forced to deal with the public's objections. Following that, the MPs decided to exclude people from decision-making in all projects where the environmental impact is assessed.
However, such an amendment is in clear contradiction with EU's EIA regulation, which guarantees "timely and effective opportunities to participate on the environmental impact assessment processes".
Ahner warned in the letter that this discrepancy could block the authorisation of numerous projects due to EA regulations.
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