Chapter 6: Estonia

(continued)

CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

The legal framework supporting public participation in environmental decisionmaking in Estonia in December 1997 is quite the same as it was described in the REC report of 1995. During the last three years there have been no new laws adopted which would promote public participation; instead, the Law on State Secrets was reviewed in the summer of 1997, making it even stronger. Now an authority who has provided information which is considered to be a state secret even unwittingly, will be considered guilty of breaking this law. In March 1996, the Law on Database Protection was adopted, in which data collected in the framework of state statistics is not available to the general public. This, for example, is the general obstacle in giving the interested public access to databases of pollution release that are compiled via obligatory annual reports from all production enterprises.

At the same time, the practice of public participation in environmental decisionmaking has developed strongly in Estonia. While in 1995 there were single cases of public participation in environmental impact assessment procedures reported, they were mainly organized by initiative from abroad, and the participation of NGO experts in some legislative documents happened on an ad hoc basis. In 1996-97, NGOs participated quite extensively in the drafting processes of the National Environmental Strategy, the National Environmental Action Plan and the Forest Policy. In November 1996, the Estonian Green Movement together with GLOBE organized a public hearing on the Estonian Energy Strategy involving both NGOs and parliamentarians in a common discussion. In 1997 this lead to the inclusion of many chapters on renewable energy resources in the Energy Strategy - an event that seemed quite impossible just a year ago.

Parallel to the NEAP project was the approximation of the Estonian environmental laws undertaken this winter as a PHARE DISAE project, which found that the only law in Estonia which is in compliance with the EU Directive on Access to Environmental Information is the Law on Building and Planning. So there is a lot of work to be done in approximation of the other environmental laws. We are happy to say that this work has been started under the PHARE ENMOCAP project in collaboration with Irish colleagues, and that the draft recommendations for including public control provisions in the permitting procedures, as well as elaborating IT software for better communication of environmental data from the county environmental departments and environmental laboratories to the MoE Information Center and Environmental Inspection, are in the stage of being commented upon by various contact persons representing the future users.

Solving problems should be started by removing them from the work of professional environment protection specialists - only then can we start to provide the different groups of public access to different types and levels of databases containing environmental information. It seems that the computerization in Estonia, and providing the "local" municipalities with an e-mail network is going on at a greater speed than preparing the environmental databases to be explored with these technological means.

Recommendations

For the last nine months Estonian NGO representatives, including the authors of the present paper, have had the chance to discuss and include 44 activities for improving access to information in the National Environmental Action Plan. The two suggestions that were considered to be too strong for the NEAP level document were the following:

Inclusion of the right to healthy environment and access to environmental information into the Constitution of the Republic of Estonia, as this is the gap causing inconsistency between the different level legislative documents and hindering the inclusion of public participation provisions into the Laws. The authors of the present paper do not support the statement that adoption of the Law on Sustainable Development has already filled the gap. It has not.
Founding of the Environmental Protection Agency on the basis of the present Information Center and the county environmental departments.

The Estonian NEAP forum, consisting of more than 250 persons, considered improving the public awareness (access to information) the cornerstone and measuring device for public participation as well as an important precondition for access to justice. In Estonia (as compared to America) going to court is still considered to be something to be avoided until the last possibility, and an effort to solve arguments in more "peaceful" and reasonable discussions is made. This is why the number of administrative court cases to sue an environmental action are usually started only by professional environmental inspectors and not by NGOs or private persons.

Estonia is such a small country that usually there have been no problems for specialists to participate in drafting environmental laws if they have really had a serious interest to do so. It has been, and is still a problem to influence the discussions of the environmental committee of parliament. Participation in decisionmaking on the local/regional level could be improved as well. The guidelines for the public control system elaborated in the framework of the PHARE ENMOCAP project will be a strong help for that.

Future Needs

In the future there will be another important document: the Aarhus Convention on Access to Information, Public Participation in Decisionmaking and Access to Justice in Environmental Matters. It is hoped that implementation of this document will not encounter any problems. The more detailed needs and suggestions listed in the Estonian report on the "Status of Public Participation Practices in Environmental Decisionmaking in Central and Eastern Europe," published in 1995 by the REC are also all relevant.

REC * PUBLICATIONS * DOORS TO DEMOCRACY - CEE * ESTONIA