Bresters Resume Street Protests Against AKB Plant
- 14.01.2020, 16:32
- 2,220
The action ended with a march along the central streets of the city.
On Sunday, January 12, initiative residents of the city traditionally gathered in the Lenin Square to protest against the construction of a battery plant near Brest. More than 80 people came to feed the pigeons. According to Brest human rights activist Raman Kislyak, today the main topic of discussion was the illegality of the public environmental review procedure initiated by IPower, Brestskaya gazeta reports.
“How can it be public if it is initiated by the enterprise itself?”, commented Kislyak.
Important to note, on January 10, the activists prepared and sent a statement about the need for public discussions regarding the construction site of the IPower battery plant. The recipients were Lukashenka’s administration, the Brest district executive committee, the city executive committee, and the regional executive committee.
According to the applicants, IPower violated the law when it initiated a public environmental review of the plant’s design documentation without announcing public discussions of the documents.
In particular, the authors refer to several paragraphs of the “Regulation of the Procedure for Conducting Public Ecological Expertise”, approved by the Decree of the Council of Ministers of the Republic of Belarus #1592 of 10.29.2010, and state that the public environmental review is an integral part of public discussions and is carried out exclusively within the framework of public discussions on the Environmental Impact Assessment Report (EIA).
Activists demand that IPower LLC must bring its activities in line with the legislation of the Republic of Belarus, and hold public discussions of the EIA report in 2020, within the framework of which it will be possible to conduct a public environmental review.
The collection of signatures under the statement with the demand to hold public discussions continued today, January 12, in the square, as well as during a traditional march along the Pushkinskaya and Savetskaya Streets up to the “Belarus” movie theatre.
