INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE OF OMBUDSMEN AND NATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS INSTITUTIONS FOR THE ENVIRONMENT

At the invitation of the United Nations Development Program—UNDP office in the Republic of North Macedonia—representatives of the Agency for the Protection of the Right to Free Access to Public Information participated in the two-day International Conference of Ombudsmen and National Institutions for Human Rights and the Environment.

Environmental justice was at the centre of attention at the conference, and representatives from the region and Europe shared their experiences and strategies for protecting human rights against environmental threats. The conference aims to strengthen the environmental justice efforts that began with the 2017 Ljubljana Declaration and the establishing of the Regional Network of Environmental and Human Rights Ombudsman.

The director of the Agency, Plamenka Bojcheva, also participated in the conference as a panellist on the topic: “National perspectives for environmental protection and justice in North Macedonia”. In her address, she emphasised: “The protection and improvement of the environment is a central issue affecting people’s well-being and economic development. It is the desire and need of the world’s peoples, and accordingly – it is the obligation of all governments. However, to exercise this right and fulfil this duty, citizens must have access to information, the right to participate in decision-making, and justice concerning environmental protection issues.

In this sense, the competent authorities in each country are obliged to provide a clear, publicly accessible, and consistent set of legally regulated mechanisms that will contribute to public participation in decision-making, the quality of the decisions that are made, their implementation, and, in general, the raising of public awareness on aspects of environmental protection.

Realizing the right to access information also means enabling the realisation of other human rights, especially the realization of the right to a healthy environment and the realization of everyone’s duty to promote and protect the environment and nature. The development of technique and technology enables this information to be published and transmitted easily and quickly, i.e. for institutions to consistently respect the obligation to make information available on their initiative, voluntarily and on time, i.e. to practice proactive transparency and thus publish information on its web pages”.

The conference was organized within the project “Increasing the Role of the Ombudsman of the Republic of North Macedonia in Environmental Justice”, financed by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs Norad. It was carried out in cooperation with the United Nations Development Program – UNDP and the High Commissioner for Human Rights office at the UN in Skopje United Nations Human Rights.