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Greenpeace Loses Supreme Court Appeal against Olympics Site
The Russian Supreme Court rejected an appeal by Greenpeace Russia in which the ecologists demand that the federal target program for the development of the city of Sochi through 2014 by declared illegal. Representatives of the Ministry of Economic Development and Trade and the Federal Service for Resource Use Supervision argued successfully that the program is not required to undergo ecological scrutiny.
Notably, the court made its decision after Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov practically admitted to its illegality by calling for amendments to the program to be developed by “ecologists and scientists.”
Sochi is competing to host the Winter Olympic Games in 2014. Ecologists are convinced that the program for the construction of Olympic facilities in the city was adopted without legislatively mandated ecological studies. Those concerns were echoed by Igor Chestin, director of the Russian division of the World Wildlife Fund. Two days after Chestin sent a letter to Russian President Vladimir Putin stating his concerns, in the middle of last month, Zhukov decided to form an ecological coordinating committee that was to study the program until the end of April. Greenpeace favored an approach through the court system, however.
Elena Astakhova explained to the court that the program was instituted under old ecological legislation that required facilities built under the program to be subject to ecological expertise, but not the program itself. The Supreme Court promised to write the motivational section of its decision later. Chestin objected that the court itself was breaking the law. “The illegality of the program was admitted in the meeting with Deputy Prime Minister Alexander Zhukov,” he said. “There is a logic to the actions of the court, of course. Ruling in favor of the appeal would mean stopping all work and financing of the program. But the court shouldn't take that into consideration. That is the government's problem.”
www.kommersant.com
All the Article in Russian as of Mar. 22, 2007
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