Cases

List of cases

St. Anthony Cathedral Mineral Fertilizer Terminal Case Waste Incineration Plant

There are several reasons why court instruments are not effective enough to defend the environmental rights of citizens and NGOs. The correspondent procedural principles are not bad, but they need to be improved.

The main problem, as it has been previously mentioned, is a lack of public awareness of environmental legislation and individual rights, and doubts about the ability to successfully defend those rights. Therefore, citizens often do not appeal to either the judicial bodies or to NGOs to deal with the problem. In addition, there are only three NGOs involved in environmental issues in Ukraine, and private attorneys do not deal with environmental cases because they are not profitable. Ukrainian legislation does not fix certain regulations of filing lawsuits subject to termination, prohibition of some kinds of activities of enterprises, institutions, organizations that pollute the environment. The effective mechanisms of compensation for damages caused to citizens’ health as a consequence of damage to the environment and of public participation in ecological decision-making process as well as of implementation of other principles of democracy are also missing in the Ukrainian legislation.

There are financial barriers on the way to justice: though the amount of state duty for non-material disputes and lawsuits in Ukraine is not high, ecological expertise is prohibitively expensive.

Despite the above mentioned problems, the number of environmental cases solved in favor of citizens increases every year in Ukraine. Some examples taken from the practice of Ecopravo-Lviv are presented here (their titles are of relative nature).