As the countries in Central and Eastern Europe open up and become more accessible to the rest of the world, so should their environmental rules and regulations. Corporations need them to do business here, citizens need them to protect their right to a healthy environment, governments need them to keep everyone in line. Information technology is proving to be an effective way of doing all of that, and more, even in a region where infrastructure problems and high costs have limited some of the benefits of electronic communications.
The Czech Ministry of Environment has kept up with the latest electronic wizardry rather well. They have grabbed the IT bull by the horns and set up their own home page on the now-infamous World Wide Web. A trip to http://www.env.cz will uncover a number of treasures, including the country's environmental legislation and regulations, a presentation of its environmental policy, and links to other organizations responsible for environmental protection in the Czech Republic.
In Hungary, volumes of legislation have been compressed onto one thin little sliver of a CD-ROM. What used to require a car to move from one place to another now fits in your back pocket. Every article and every paragraph comprising the backbone of the Hungarian legal system can be found in its full-text entirety on this fully searchable compact disc. Legislation and regulations can be located by type of document, issuing agency, date, title, sub-title, keywordsÑthe list goes on and on. Those who use it (i.e. those who speak Hungarian) tell me it's very complete, and it's updated every month.
Not all governments in the region have been so diligent in their duty to disseminate environmental regulations. Romania's environmental regs have been exceedingly hard to come by, according to Ovidiu Oancea, the REC's Romanian local representative. There are only one or two sources in Bucharest where official versions are available for viewing, and the government, hiding behind a list of excuses that wouldn't all fit on this page, including penury, has made it all but impossible to obtain copies.
But modern-day information technology, like the printing press that started mass producing information centuries ago, has come to the rescue. The National Union of Ecology Students, a Romanian environmental NGO, decided a database of Romania's environmental legislation was in order. So, with financial support from the REC, they gathered 98 of Romania's 128 environmental regulations (the other 30 simply "aren't available") and installed them on two diskettes. They have since distributed all 100 copies from their first "print run," and are planning to distribute an updated version in April 1996.
Whether it is an initiative of the government or of the civil sector is almost irrelevant. (Almost, but that's another issue for another day.) The point is that IT is making environmental legislation widely available to anyone who wants itÑas long as they have the proper hardware. And as costs plummet and personal computers become as common as TVs, and as information institutes like the REC continue to expand, access to environmental information will become easier than writing your own name.