In Geneva, before the Committee of the Espoo Convention on Transboundary Pollution, the confrontation between Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia over the dumping of nuclear waste on Trgovska Gora began.
Just a few hundred meters from the border with BiH, in the immediate vicinity of Novi Grad, Croatia plans to store low and medium radioactive waste. We are talking about waste from the Krško Nuclear Power Plant and that from hospitals, industry and the military. About 250 thousand inhabitants of BiH are in the zone of potential influence.
In December of last year, the Croatian Parliament passed the Law on the Construction of a Center for the Disposal of Radioactive Waste under emergency procedure, which gave the green light for the start of disposal.
Today, a meeting was held before the Committee of the Espoo Convention in Geneva due to the application that our country sent stating that Croatia violated the International Convention on Transboundary Pollution.
The delegations consist of representatives of the institutions of BiH and Croatia, experts in the field of nuclear safety, environmental protection, international law, cross-border procedures, as well as representatives of the BiH Expert Team.
The coordinator of the BiH Expert Team for Trgovska Gora, Branislav Bojić, said that Croatia has no answers to many questions, which it should have answered when it comes to the Espoo Convention, and that it has not complied with all that the Espoo Convention foresees.
“I expect the Espoo Committee to show, first of all, its full strength in terms of its position to exert a certain type of pressure, both legal and international, in order to ensure that Croatia respects everything it has signed under this international convention,” said Bojić, reports RTRS.
The Minister of Spatial Planning, Construction and Ecology of the RS, who is part of the team, Bojan Vipotnik reminded in his opening address that Croatia has already undertaken activities at that location, including demolition and preparatory works. He also emphasized that the problem is the way the location was chosen.
He added that the confrontation between BiH and Croatia was very successful and that we can be satisfied with the outcome.
“It is problematic that the Croatian side did not include us in the research that they conducted on their side, that they did not take into account the findings of our research that we offered, we invited them to join in order to form a joint team that would, so to speak, conduct joint research,” Vipotnik told RTRS.
Vipotnik explained that the delegation of Bosnia and Herzegovina was the first to respond to the questions previously submitted by the secretariat of the Convention, stressing that they received a total of three questions. After that, as he stated, there was a presentation by the Croatian side, which answered as many as 13 questions, and then the discussion was opened.
According to him, the Croatian delegation received a large number of additional questions both from the secretariat of the Convention and from the representatives of BiH, while BiH. the delegation, as he claims, was not asked any questions from the Croatian side.
Vipotnik assessed that the Croatian delegation was not ready for today’s confrontation, stressing that this attitude is shared by members of the legal team and representatives of institutions that were part of the delegation, he writes Klix.
