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Project Goals and Tasks
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1. project Goals and tasks
According to the Terms of Reference, the project has two goals, namely:
Preparation of proposals for the Strategic Action Programme (SAP) for harmonizing the environmental legislation of Dnipro River countries with the harmonized environmental legislation of the EU, which are intended to ensure the implementation of international conventions, agreements and treaties, and for reforming relevant current legislation of Dnipro River states
Assessment of the potential and time required for the harmonization of national environmental legislation, an assessment of estimated financial expenditures related to the task, and of the economic and environmental effectiveness of its realization
In order to achieve the specified goals, it was necessary to do the following:
To develop methodology for the comparative analysis of the national environmental legislation of Dnipro River countries and relevant EU legislation
To conduct an analysis of current international conventions and agreements ratified by the Dnipro River countries; the conventions, agreements and treaties concluded by Dnipro River countries for establishing legal regulations governing the use and protection of natural objects; and the relevant requirements and priorities for harmonizing environmental legislation
To conduct an analysis of the structure and composition of EU legislation for protecting and regulating the use of water resources
To compile a sequentially ordered list for the development of laws on nature management and environmental protection in the section dealing with water resources (namely, the harmonization of these regulations with EU legislation)
To assess the potential and time required for preparing drafts of the harmonized laws, the estimated financial costs related to this task, and the environmental and economic effectiveness of its realization
In accordance with the Terms of Reference, the national reports shall also contain the following information:
list of laws and other regulations (resolutions, government decrees) related to nature management and environmental protection (water codes, forest regulation, regulations for mineral resources and environmental protection, including air and waste management) in the section dealing with water resources
Key terms and definitions related to water codes and environmental legislation (with respect to water bodies and water protective zones)
Key legal regulations for nature management and environmental protection, including:
- Legal regulations in the section dealing with ownership of water bodies and land within the water protective zones of water bodies
- Legal regulations for the use and protection of water bodies and the soil of related water protective zones, including regulations governing types of licenses for
water use, and land tenure in water protective zones
- The system of state-managed public authorities responsible for managing the use and environmental protection of water bodies, as well as the environmental protection
and state control related thereto (both horizontal and vertical, i.e., at federal, territorial and local levels)
- Liability for violating nature management and environmental protection legislation, and other articles that facilitate the development of the main trends in the drafting
harmonized legislation
- Concrete proposals for the Strategic Action Programme, in the section dealing with harmonization of water protection laws
Materials related to these issues are presented in Appendices A, B and C.
It should be noted that while realizing the project, experts from the three countries discovered discrepancies in the various interpretations of “harmonization.” The Ukrainian expert, Volodymyr Lozansky, understood “harmonization” to be a bilateral (or multilateral) process that involves approximating the positions (opinions, requirements, regulations, etc.) of the parties. It is therefore possible to speak about the harmonization (i.e., mutual approximation) of the national legislation of two or more independent states. In the case of EU legislation and the national legislation of non-EU members, the notion of “harmonization” does not apply because EU legislation is the standard to which national legislation is to be approximated. In other words, this is a unilateral process of approximating national regulations to EU standards that are presently considered to be unalterable. Lately in Europe, this process has been called “approximation,” while in Ukraine it is called “adaptation.”
The terms “approximation” and “adaptation” were not used in the ToR (in the preparation of which Lozansky did not participate). The experts from Belarus and Russia believe it is possible to dispense with the use of such terms and to interpret harmonization as a unilateral, bilateral or multilateral process. In the discussions that took place August 25-26, the experts failed to agree on this issue. All of the foregoing should therefore be taken into account when reading the consolidated report.
