There is an old English adage that places knowledge above food: "If a person is hungry, it is better to teach them how to fish than it is to give them fish."
There is an old English adage that places knowledge above food: "If a person is hungry, it is better to teach them how to fish than it is to give them fish."
The situation is just as true for individuals starved for information on environmental issues and their legal rights. The extended metaphor would go something like this: "It is better to teach a person how to seek legal recompense for the ill-effects of environmental degradation in the courts, than to go to court for them." At least that's what Svitlana Kravchenko, a law professor and public advocacy expert from Lviv, Ukraine, discovered during her three-week sabbatical at the Regional Environmental Center in Budapest.
Kravchenko came to the REC's Head Office in Budapest to study public participation and public advocacy law in the Czech Republic, Hungary, and Slovakia, hoping to improve the situation back home where she lectures in the Faculty of Law at Lviv State University and helps run the Environmental Public Advocacy Center (EPAC).
While the Ukraine has made significant progress in passing environmental legislation and developing theoretical mechanisms for public participation, practical implementation is lagging far behind some of the more progressive countries in Central and Eastern Europe. A number of obstacles are responsible for this gap. Though Kravchenko believes the Ukraine sees environmental protection as fundamental to building a law-based, democratic state, she also says a stagnant economy and low government spending (the government spends just 0.2 percent of GNP on environmental protection) have hindered tangible improvements in the state of the environment. Other problems include the low environmental consciousness of citizens and decisionmakers, lack of respect for the law, and an acute lack of awareness of citizens' legal rights regarding access to environmental information and the enforcement of environmental legislation.
This often leads to an apathetic and powerless population that refuses to take matters into their own hands. When citizens complained that pollution from the Lviv Glass Factory was endangering their health, officials ordered the glass-maker to reduce the levels of sand, coal and noise it was exporting into the atmosphere. The factory ignored the government's directive and continued to contaminate the environs with pollutants. Finally, the glass factory was commanded to close its doors. This got the director's attention, and EPAC negotiated a settlement, forcing the enterprise to purchase cleaner technology that reduced noise and air pollution. The polluter also compensated one family whose apartment had been damaged as a direct result of its excessive pollution levels.
"Our citizens don't know their rights, so we exercise them on their behalf," Kravchenko says of the advocacy center she works for. "We go to court for citizens while they sit at home and wait for the outcome."
Kravchenko believes that educating the citizenry is the answer to raising awareness, and her experiences during her sabbatical have altered her perception of how this should be accomplished. She discovered that the Center for Public Advocacy in Banska Bystrinca, Slovakia, for instance, teaches individuals how to exercise their legal rights themselves, rather than taking legal action on their behalf. Advisors provide citizens with basic legal information and help them use the legal mechanisms, such as petitions, that the judicial system has already made available to them.
"It is better to teach people how to exercise their rights than it is to exercise their rights for them," she says, emphasizing the "how" rather than the "what." If people are taught how to wield the sword of justice rather than sup on the spoils of battle, both democracy and the environment in the Ukraine will be much better off over the long term.