Law & Structure

WRITE A PETITION TO YOUR MINISTRY or/and  EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT and CHANGE THE WORLD!

TAKES only A COUPLE OF HOURS TO DO!

Go to the website of the International Committée on Nuclear Justice, ICNJ, for the latest info   www.nuclearjustice.org

Explanation of the Strategy behind the Petition, Complaint and Plea for Redress, directed to The Ministry of the Environment of <Any EU Country>.

C Busby 7^th March 2012

It is clear to all that the evidence shows that radioactive pollution from Chernobyl, Fukushima and nuclear power plants, reprocessing sites etc has been killing people. The evidence is now overwhelming. But the evidence is ignored by the authorities. This is because they believe, or pretend to believe in the ICRP risk model. So there is an impass. Despite the huge amount of evidence in the peer review literature, the politicians, who are not scientists, believe the ICRP and UNSCEAR, who dismiss any evidence they don’t like and do not even discuss it or cite it. How do we deal with this Kafakesque situation?

There is a way. It is to use Human Rights and Environment Legislation. For those who are interested I refer to Malone and Pasternack 2005. There are a number of ways of plugging this stuff into the system in such a way that it has to be formally dealt with. The specific hook is the EURATOM Basic Safety Standards Directive which was considered by the European Parliament in 1998. I was asked to consider this by the Irish Greens in Brussels in 1998, and that is where ECRR started. But we advised the Parliament to oppose the EURATOM BSS which specifically permitted recycling radioactive waste into consumer goods. The Parliament was unable to block the BSS as EURATOM precedes the EU Treaty and the Parliament has only advisory status. But they were able to get an amendment to the original document. It was a very important (for us, and all living) amendment which was:

Article 46

Justification

1. Member States shall ensure that new classes of practices resulting in exposure to

ionising radiation are justified in advance of being first adopted or first approved.

2. Existing classes of practices shall be reviewed as to justification whenever new and important evidence about their efficacy or potential consequences is acquired.

What this means, is that the EC and the Member State Competent Authorities have to by law re-open the issue of Justification if there is new evidence that their original justification was faulty. And, of course, there is new evidence. The EURATOM BSS was drafted in the late 1980s and even by 1996 the effects of Chernobyl were not clearly in the literature. But now they are. And a whole lot more besides. Since 1996, the ECRR has published 2 risk models and has picked up many extremely eminent radiation experts. At the same time, the ICRP has lost Jack Valentin and now has very few competent individuals. It is easy to show that ICRP and UNSCEAR are nuclear stooges. But we need a platform for this

European Court of Justice (ECJ) European Court of Human Rights (ECHR)

The teeth behind this strategy is the ECJ or the ECHR. I have won all the court cases I have fought as expert witness on this issue, (now more than 20) because in a court, it is the evidence which wins the case, not the importance or the position of the witness. But you cannot take a case to the ECJ or the ECHR or any similar body without first exhausting the possibilities of redress at national level. Therefore we must begin with raising the issue at the national level.

The Sequence of Events

1. Pr Chris Busby has provided 2 templates for the NGOs and any individual in the country to use. The first is the one . It must be sent or better delivered by hand with video to the Minister of the Environment of the country. I have put <SWEDEN> in the example, but the petition and plea may be adapted to another country. You must either get an agreement to re-open the Euratom Justification, or await a refusal. If you get a refusal we will take the matter to the Justice ministry of the country asking for a refusal and explaining that we can then use that refusal to take the case to the ECJ and the ECHR.

2. The second one will be a Petition to the Petitions Committee of the European Parliament. This is another way of opening up the issue. I will provide this separately.

3.  The list of citations and documents needed to back up the assertions will also be provided separately.

For any questions or help email Ditta Rietuma bsr@euradcom.org

Ref Malone LA and Pasternack S (2006) “Defending the Environment: Civil Strategies to Enforce International Environmental Law“. Washington: Island Press

Download: 1.   National Environmental Ministry Petition  Petition-Environment-Ministry-ANY-EU-COUNTRY-ICNJ

2.   European Parliament EURATOM Petition    European Parlament EURATOM Petition 07.06.2012 ICNJ

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