Filip Gregor
Head of the Responsible Companies Team
Environmental Law Service is co-organising a half-day conference on lobbying transparency, ethics regulation and citizens participation, taking place in Brussels on 16 November.
The conference is organised by Access Info Europe, Aitec (Association Internationale des Techniciens, Experts et Chercheurs), Environmental Law Service, Friends of the Earth Europe, Health Action International, and Spinwatch, as part of the EU-funded project ‘Accountability, Lobbying Transparency and Ethics Regulation: Citizens have a right to know (ALTER-Citizens)’.
As part of the reform of the EU Non-Financial Reporting Directive, the European Commission plans to develop mandatory EU sustainability reporting standards. The analysis of the non-financial reports of 1000 European companies by the Alliance for Corporate Transparency has proven how companies fail to report relevant, specific and comparable information. While this is true for all sustainability matters, it is particularly exacerbated in the case of corporate impacts and risks along the supply chain.
The European Court of Justice has ruled that mining at Poland’s sprawling Turów coal mine must cease while the court processes a Czech government lawsuit against Poland for illegally operating the mine. The Polish mine pushes right up to the Czech and German borders and is depleting people’s water supplies and undercutting houses in nearby communities.
Local groups and NGOs including Frank Bold, that is very active in the process, welcomed the Czech government’s decision to file a lawsuit at the European Court of Justice against the Polish government for the illegal operation of the Turów lignite coal mine, which has been dug right up to the Czech and German borders, damaging local water supplies for nearby communities. This is the first such legal case for the Czech Republic and the first in EU’s history where one member state sues another for environmental reasons.
