Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2006-01-17-Speech-2-314"
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"en.20060117.23.2-314"2
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".
Mr President, I would like firstly to point out that this report by Parliament, which must facilitate the work of adapting to the Århus Convention, is a necessary and appropriate instrument. I therefore acknowledge the efforts of the rapporteur and the other Members to apply this Convention to the mechanisms currently in place in the Member States and the Community institutions with a view to guaranteeing the legitimate right to environmental information and justice. In this regard, we believe that better access to information and greater participation by the public in decision-making will make it possible to apply those decisions more effectively and will contribute to increasing awareness of environmental problems amongst the public.
The Convention will have to enhance transparency, responsibility and good governance in such diverse areas of public action as energy, agriculture, transport and tourism, by recognising a series of rights aimed at guaranteeing the effective participation of the citizens in public decision-making processes. That information must provide sufficient knowledge to allow them to participate actively and consistently in the different administrative procedures. Furthermore, the right to promote the administrative or legal resources they consider appropriate must be recognised when it is judged that those rights have been violated by public administrations.
With regard to the specific aspects of the report, I believe that in relation to access to justice for NGOs, the latter should not have excessively restrictive requirements, such as the requirement to work at international level and, above all, that of not having been registered for more than two years for the presentation of requests. I believe that in many cases that would be a serious injustice.
Furthermore, with a view to ensuring that justice is universal, I believe that we should reject the idea of the European Investment Bank being able to deny access to environmental information, since the Århus Convention states that exceptions must be interpreted narrowly and the inclusion of the term ‘banking’ enlarges the notion of confidentiality. In fact, the directive on public access to environmental information does not lay down specific rules for banks. I would like the Commission to agree on these two specific issues because I believe them to be the most important ones.
I hope that this Regulation will be applied as soon as possible, in order to guarantee access to justice on all environmental issues."@en1
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