In September 2006 I had the good fortune to be invited to speak at a conference in Mariupol, Ukraine, on the ‘Effective Implementation of Environmental Laws’. What is happening there now has reminded me of a visit to Ukraine at a point in time when it was still emerging from its Soviet past, and of earlier witnessing the Berlin Wall and life behind the Iron Curtain.
Mariupol is a seaport on the Sea of Azov, and a chief port of export for long trains of Donbass coal from the Donetsk mines. It was home to the Ilyich steelworks, the Azovstal steelworks and Azovmash, huge Soviet industrial complexes, which as my notes said -“glower at the town from its Eastern edges, and emit ridiculous, cartoon clouds of gross pollution which roll over the little houses and rundown apartment blocks, making large numbers of local people very ill”.
At the conference itself a message was read out from the President stressing the importance of its deliberations. Participants included Ukrainian MPs and members of the Verkhovna Rada Committees. The Deputy Environment Minister for Ukraine turned up at our workshop. He had previously been in charge of the Donetsk region, and his views on environmental law enforcement were unreconstructed. Academicians and law professors made formal presentations in sequence, and there was relatively little debate, more a series of speeches in what I assumed might be the style of an early Soviet.
I gave my presentation, in English with Ukrainian copies for those present, and Russian translation. My main theme was Dante’s question “The laws exist, but who is going to enforce them?” I reminded them that the Russian scientist Dobroslavin had set out the clearest basis for water laws in 1874 and 1903, but it made no difference to the protection of Russian waters, because nobody enforced the laws. I had written elsewhere about the direct links between Russia’s politics and the state of its environment. I argued for the need to reconnect environmental laws with the real concerns of real people, to offer hope, and to make real lives better, finishing with a quote from one of the Ukrainian youngsters at a Hereford Camp for Children of Chernobyl, who had just graduated from University and said that …”life is great”.
The next day, to the further bafflement of Western participants, the conference organisers resolved themselves into a committee to prepare a lengthy communique, greeting the conference proceedings (which had not concluded) as a resounding success. Feeling that we had gone some way in order to participate, we insisted on joining in, and on having written into the proceedings a Declaration of Principles on the Implementation of Environmental Law in Ukraine which I scribbled down in some haste. They read as follows –
IT IS THE CONCLUSION OF THIS CONFERENCE THAT –
Ukraine needs its environmental laws to be implemented effectively. At present, in many cases, they are not implemented at all. Government must seek the means of implementation through its present institutions and make every effort to strengthen them.
Laws must be clear and enforceable, and applied according to regulations appropriate to each industry sector, based wherever possible on the best available science.
Industry must comply with the laws and regulations, and must deliver effective control of pollution and emissions, and must face deterrent sanctions if it fails to do so.
Environmental permits are required, with clear operating conditions, and enforcement by inspectors who should monitor, investigate and enforce the laws and prosecute offenders.
No one should be able to ignore the law. Those responsible for industrial enterprises who know what the law is but choose to ignore it should face criminal sanctions and deterrent penalties.
Corruption is an aggravating factor and should always attract extra penalties.
The courts have an important role to play in ensuring that environmental laws are effective.
Public participation in lawmaking and access to justice are essential. In the longer term, building public support for environmental laws is their best defence.
The health of future generations of Ukrainians and the protection of Ukraine’s environment demands that politicians, courts, industry and civil society all take immediate steps to make environmental laws effective.
DONE AT MARIUPOL
September 2006
Then the conference resolved itself into further closing sessions, a buffet, and many speeches and toasts – mine was to “the students.”
I never had any illusions that a group of visiting Western environmental specialists visiting such a conference would in itself make any immediate difference. Looking back at our fine resolutions, they seem today like the fluttering of tiny prayer flags. But having spent much time in the 1970s at a Western embassy behind the Iron Curtain, I had witnessed Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin at the height of the Cold War, and had once seen Russian tanks exercising on the plains of Eastern Europe. I felt that I knew and understood the lengths to which Russia had to go in order to oblige its client states to toe the line, and to keep the reluctant citizenry from departing en masse for a better life in other countries. With that in mind, it was extraordinary and a privilege to be able even to visit Mariupol, to travel within Ukraine, and to speak freely and exchange ideas with some of its students and other environmental lawyers and experts from Ukraine, Moldova, Armenia, Georgia. To me, those freedoms were the real significance of the proceedings. We took small steps to try to record our experience, like small pins fixed in the rock face of post Soviet treatment of the environment, and at that point it felt like a time of opening up to a world outside.
The next day we visited the marshes on the Russian border at the edge of the Azov Sea, and the Meothida Reserve, then a candidate for national park status. In ten minutes I saw three Marsh Harriers, some Terns and a Bee Eater. I listened to more speeches, but about the nature of the park, the pollution of the Azov Sea, the work being done to involve children from the Donetsk region in the development of the reserve, and the pride of Ukrainian visitors in the results. My toast this time, suggested by my son, was “Podzielski!” or “Keep Going!”. It must be at about this point on the coast that in the last few days Russian soldiers have come ashore from ships in the Sea of Azov as part of the Russian invasion, and as this is written, they are shelling Mariupol, as part of an effort to establish a new land corridor to the Crimea.
After the conference, I took an 18 hour train journey from Mariupol to Kyiv, and met my wife and a friend. They had been to Lviv, and then to Chernihiv for discussions about medical supplies and another camp for Children of Chernobyl. We visited the haunting National Chernobyl Museum …”with its video clips of cheery Soviet soldiers on the roof of the reactor, shovelling intensely radioactive debris into the remaining reactor; miners underneath the plant with no protective gear at all, tunnelling and building a concrete floor; and children playing in the streets of Pripyat just before being told to evacuate the city.” This week it is reported that Russian troops have captured the former Chernobyl plant. Perhaps they have plans to re-write that history too.
And we visited the Pechersk Lavra monastery, with Orthodox music that seemed to come from a different time, and caves beneath the complex, where the light from tapers showed lines of young Ukrainians bending to kiss the glass fronted coffins of departed saints, to the discordant sound of the mighty Orthodox bells from the bell tower. It is reported that President Putin has also visited this monastery – and yet has found it within himself to unleash cruise missiles, tanks and ground forces on the city and people of Kyiv, and other cities in Ukraine.
When I think of Ukraine, I think of Meothida, and Mariupol, of Chernobyl and the children that we have met who suffered from it, the Pechersk Lavra, Bulgakov’s house, the story of Lviv and the profoundly beautiful music of the Bojan Ensemble of Kyiv – and the gulf between the wonders of Russian literature and culture, and the nature of its governments. I think of my own father’s ship in the Second World War, battling through the winter seas on the Arctic convoys to bring supplies to Soviet Russia. And while President Putin’s armies may win battles in the streets and cities of Ukraine, by the exercise of limitless brutality, I cannot help noting that he has irretrievably lost the battle of ideas. Ukrainians have tasted freedom, lived independence, and their astonishing bravery in the face of overwhelming odds is writing new history. The Soviet Union never managed to extinguish that belief in Finland, East Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia.