NGOs concerned over Ukraine’s disregard for European environmental conventions

Ukraine has endorsed and joined over forty international environmental protection conventions of global or regional significance. Yet environmentalists say that it is not doing anything to implement the conditions imposed by these conventions.

The Kyiv Environmental and Cultural Centre, together with Ecopravo-Kyiv, have lodged a complaint with the European Union against the Ministry for Environmental Protection and the State Committee on the Forestry Industry for not implementing at least two European conventions on the protection of biodiversity. According to the Director of the Kyiv Environmental and Cultural Centre, Volodymyr Boreiko, the immediate reason is the fact that the said State structures are doing nothing about the extermination of the babak [a rodent which lives on the steppe]  They are also taking the State Committee on the Forestry Industry to court.

“According to official figures, there are around two thousand of these animals remaining in Ukraine, however our figures suggest no more than one thousand and due to the value of their fur, they are constantly under threat from hunters and poachers.”

The Kyiv Environmental and Cultural Centre was created 20 years ago in 1989. it is mainly involved in preventing the sale of plants entered in Ukraine’s Red Book, of the results of poaching and trading in live good.