Turkey gives ‘license to plunder’ for shopping malls and residential complexes

Turkey’s Environment Ministry has exempted a number of construction projects – including shopping malls, residential complexes, golf courts and small sized hydro-electric plants – from the mandatory environmental impact assessment process, in blatant violation of a Constitutional Court ruling.

The new legislation, which gives companies operating across many sectors a license to plunder, entered into force on Nov. 25 after being published in the Official Gazette.

“The changes are against common sense, logic or science,” the Turkish Chamber of Environmental Engineers said regarding the new legislation.

The changes are also against jurisprudence, as the Constitutional Court halted as recently as last July a previous ruling lifting the obligation to submit an impact assessment report for projects “that were included in the financial investment program prior to 1997.”

Activists had at the time stressed that bypassing environmental obligations violated several international conventions that Turkey has signed.

However, the new legislation regarding environmental assessment reports is even more daring than the previous one, lifting environmental obligations for many large projects, including:

-    Shopping malls;
-    Residential complexes: All projects with over 2,000 housing units are usually subject to environmental reports;
-    Golf courts;
-    Hospitals;
-    Urban transformation zones;
-    Water transmission facilities with a capacity below 100 million cubic meters (the previous threshold was only 300,000 cubic meters);
-    Railroad or underground railway projects up to 100 kilometers;
-    The extraction of minerals from seas, lakes and rivers.

Chamber of...