'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)