Water deal under attack

Date: 06/07/2000

By Gareth Harding

GREEN groups have launched a blistering attack on MEPs and EU environment ministers for failing to tighten up planned new water laws last week.

Christian Hey of the European Environmental Bureau (EEB) said the last-minute deal reached between the two sides after a month of head-to-head talks was a "disaster for the environment, embarrassing for ministers, the Environment Commissioner and the Parliament, and a blow to the EU's credentials for protecting the environment".

His organisation, which represents 135 environmental groups in Brussels, is particularly angry at the "weak legal enforceability" of the draft directive. The EEB said the absence of legally-binding targets would leave authorities "free to get away with achieving nothing".

Environmental activists are also dismayed that EU laws to protect groundwater quality have been removed from the scope of the legislation and will be decided at national level in future. EEB water expert Stefan Scheuer said the move was the "most major roll-back of an environmental directive the EU has ever experienced", adding that scrapping the 20-year-old law would give industrial farmers a "blank cheque to poison the most vulnerable water body, which is frequently used as a drinking water resource".

However, MEPs denied that they had "capitulated" to governments during the gruelling conciliation talks. The Parliament's delegation said it had made the text more legally enforceable and had successfully fought off "last-ditch attempts" to dilute the directive's overall goal of guaranteeing "good water quality" within 15 years.

MEPs also persuaded environment ministers to phase out the discharges of hazardous substances, such as lead, cadmium and mercury, into the water within the next two decades. The Union is currently only committed to this goal in principle under the international OSPAR convention.

Dutch Green MEP Alex-ander de Roo, vice-chairman of Parliament's environment committee, said his group had been "calling for a policy of zero-tolerance towards hazardous substances for a long time". The deal was also praised by Environ-ment Commissioner Margot Wallström, who said it was a "major breakthrough for European water policy".

Green groups have launched a blistering attack on MEPs and EU environment ministers for failing to tighten up planned new water laws.