'Environment court' could help protect nature

'Environment court' could help protect nature

JAKARTA (JP): The establishment of a special court is helpful in coping with the increasing number of violations of environmental protection laws, a visiting Australian judge said yesterday.

"The increasing number of industrious activities in developing countries brings forward problems, which require a special and sovereign institution to settle the environmental disputes," Justice Paul L. Stein AM of the Land and Environment Court of New South Wales, Australia, said.

He told participants at a discussion entitled The Proactive Role of the Court in Protecting the Environment, organized by the Indonesian Center for Environmental Law (ICEL), that the sovereign institution needed was a special environmental court, different from ordinary courts in practice.

"Judges of an environmental court have a specific way of making decisions on a dispute being heard," he said.

The New South Wales Land and Environment Court, established in 1980, has special authority to hear environmental disputes, including matters of environmental protection, the city master plan, waste management, poisonous materials, air, land, and water pollution, coast protection, ozone layer protection, as well as the control of biological organisms.

Stein said that judges of the environmental court could not make a decision on an environmental dispute until an evaluation has been carried out by the court's technical assessors.

"Common judges certainly do not have sufficient knowledge about the environment and must include technical considerations in their decisions," he said.

He said that not all environmental disputes were decided by the court. The court provides a mediation service that will bring the parties in dispute into a confidential meeting and help them to settle the dispute among themselves.

"The compromise which results from the meeting has firm legal force because all of the disputing parties have agreed to the solution," he said, adding that the mediation sessions had a 70 percent success rate.

He said that the Land and Environment Court operated under an open standing system, which allowed any person or institution to sue any individual or organization violating environmental laws. (imn)