Is it futile fighting for the environment in Turkey?

Environment Impact Assessment (EIA) reports, known in Turkey by their acronym ÇED, became part of Turkish legislation in 1983, but it was another 10 years before they entered into force in 1993.

Since then, the regulation has been amended 17 times, most of them in the 2000s, during the Justice and Development Party (AKP) tenure.

If a law or a regulation changes several time in Turkey, that does not necessarily mean the amendments are done in order to improve the implementation. On the contrary, if you set aside the reform movement undertaken by AKP governments in the first half of the 2000s, most of the amendments made in the second part of the 2000s aimed at rather eroding the checks-and-balances mechanisms ingrained within the laws, rules and regulations and eliminating what is seen by the government as obstructions to giving it a free ride.

"ÇED reports were not initially designed as a preliminary permit to go ahead with a project but as a mechanism to show the way to decision-makers on the possible consequences of projects, so that they can take the necessary measures to prevent the negative consequences," said Süheyla Suzan Alıca, an expert on environmental law. 

In other words, it was originally designed to present a "view."

Most of the amendments created more problems in the implementation and provided stipulations that were not environmental friendly, according to Alıca, who spoke last week at a panel in Istanbul. Representatives of civil society organizations have taken amendments to court several times on claims that they were not aimed at protecting the environment.

In 2006, the Council of State decided that the reports were not views but decisions. That was an important turning point in terms of the...