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President Parvanov Vetoed Environmental Protection Act
President Georgi Parvanov returned the Environmental Protection Act for reconsideration on Monday, the President's Press Secretariat said.
Parvanov argued that the law should develop, as well as maintain, the environmental protection standards, and create legal requirements that would guarantee the citizens' constitutional right to a healthy and favorable environment.
Parvanov said the new law changed the principle of providing information on the environment. Until now state and municipal bodies were obliged to provide such information to the whole public in routine procedure, while the new law stipulates that these bodies must provide it at the request of concrete persons.
Thus the obligation of the State to keep citizens permanently informed about circumstances which have an impact on their life and health is shifted in the direction of the individual citizen's initiative, the President said.
Article 31 introduces an obligation of the national public media to disseminate information on environmental protection and management, which is insufficient and is formal in nature, according to Parvanov. The law must guarantee that Bulgarian citizens will be informed by the competent state authorities about their living and working conditions on a daily basis, because otherwise there will be prerequisites for information blackouts on vital issues, Parvanov argued.
The President's reasoning also deals with the regulation of ecological assessment and environmental impact assessment. The legal framework does not comply fully with the State's obligations for preservation and reproduction of the environment, enshrined in Article 15 of the Constitution, and the fundamental constitutional right to a healthy and favourable environment.
The existing obligation for periodic environmental impact assessment of major polluters should not be scrapped, according to Parvanov. Article 81 of the law should be edited to oblige major polluters to make a continued effort to protect the environment.
The restriction on ecological assessment and environmental impact assessment of plans, programmes and investment proposals relating to defence and national security (Article 85(3)) would be justified only if the concept of "national security" was clearly defined, as is done in the Safeguarding of Classified Information Act, in line with the concept established in contemporary international law. This is the only way to guarantee that national security considerations will not be abused to waive ecological assessment or environmental impact assessment of a potentially dangerous project, Parvanov said.
Parvanov argued that the entities for which environmental impact assessment is required should be specified in an annex to the law. Only stable legal regulation can guarantee the public interest and form a barrier to exempting future polluters from preliminary environmental impact assessment.
Paragraph 10 of the Transitional and Final Provisions of the new law sets July 1, 2004, as the date when the new procedure, ecological assessment, will be introduced. Until then, environmental impact assessment of national and regional plans and programmes for development will be made according to a procedure, which will be determined by an ordinance by the environment minister. Thus stable legal regulation will be supplanted by lower-level regulation, albeit for a short time, which is unacceptable, especially in the sensitive area of environmental protection, the President said.
This is the third law returned for reconsideration by Parvanov after the Privatization and Post-Privatization Control Act and the Biodiversity Act.
There is no need to hold an extraordinary sitting of the National Assembly to debate the vetoed Environmental Protection Act, Parliament Chairman Ognyan Gerdjikov said.
Answering a question, Gerdjikov said he was not surprised at
the President's veto. It is quite normal for the head of state to exercise his powers, Gerdjikov said.
The vetoed law will be redebated during Parliament's autumn session, said Djevdet Chakurov, Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on the Environment and Waters.
The Committee has 15 days to draw up a report and introduce it into Parliament, but this will be done in the autumn because the committee members are on holiday.
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