The event took place today, February 22, in Brussels, in the premises of the Ukrainian Civil Society Hub. Representatives of public organizations participated online and offline and discussed the impact of russian armed aggression on climate change, as well as the environmental safety of critical infrastructure facilities, and talked about the Ukrainian-European single ecological complex.
In his report titled “Environmental health in Ukraine: a dead end of irresponsibility”, the adviser of Greco Law Company, Artemii Vorobiov, described the problems of legal regulation of the concept of environmental health and drew attention to the insufficient legal regulation of this institution in Ukraine.
In particular, he noted: “Issues of environmental health in Ukraine require both additional legislative recognition, and clarifications at the levels of scientific, research, procedural and methodical support. Precisely due to the general complexity of the problems in this field, full compliance with modern standards can be ensured only in case of full and adequate support:
– firstly, to update relevant normative acts and procedures, in order to ensure interaction between government authorities and exercise of their mandates;
– secondly, to develop and implement an efficient academic, research, procedural and methodological toolkit, based on the experience of the EU member states; and
– thirdly, to obtain a true current picture of the state of environmental health in Ukraine. It is necessary to focus our efforts on the development, launch and implementation of complex and large-scale non-governmental programs designed for monitoring and supervising the state of environmental health, in order to identify and assess its current regional and national state, and specific risk factors, including those caused or intensified in connection with hostilities on the territory of Ukraine.”
Also, during the speech, he noted: “Today, in Ukraine, we have developed techniques for calculating the damage caused to the state as a result of environmental pollution due to the armed aggression of russian federation, however, our government may seem to have a strange position as not including assessment and calculation methods to be developed and implemented into the list of types of environmental damage caused to citizens.”
Artemii Vorobiov emphasized that currently, the Greco Law Company team was working on a class action model in the interests of victims of the russian armed aggression, where claims for environmental damages caused to citizens would be a mandatory element.
The video recording of the event will be available online via the link