The Speaker of the Sejm, Włodzimierz Czarzasty, has taken out of the freezer a members’ bill on granting rights to the Oder River. This legal act, prepared by activists and only formally submitted by politicians, assumes a complete abandonment of the development of inland shipping and handing the entire river over to renaturalisation.
The members’ bill on recognising the legal personality of the Oder River is the result of work by an initiative linked to environmental activists campaigning for full protection of rivers. The activists, however, failed to collect 100,000 signatures for the draft, so politicians from the governing coalition decided to help them, chiefly from the New Left and the Polska 2050 Party. According to the explanatory memorandum, the solution has three main objectives. The first is to increase public oversight of water management, including boosting the transparency of decision-making mechanisms and establishing clear rules of institutional responsibility for taking decisions or failing to do so. The second is to abandon plans to develop inland shipping in favour of implementing and expanding the National Programme for the Renaturalisation of Surface Waters. The final objective is to create a special research-and-implementation programme that would deal not only with restoring life in the Oder. The idea is to grant the Oder River rights, including the right to exist, to free flow, to natural evolution, and several similar ones. These abstract provisions imply that virtually any human activity may violate the rights of the Oder River. Who will decide this? Of course, a specially appointed committee, representing the river and deciding what is bad or good for it. This primarily concerns the economic use of the river. And we are not talking only about wastewater issues or the operation of industrial plants, but also about purely recreational use. “It is worth emphasising that recreational use of the Oder River does not require concluding an agreement with the Committee of Representatives, provided that it does not violate the fundamental rights of the river listed in Article 3. Therefore, activities such as swimming, kayaking, angling (in accordance with the recommendations of the Scientific Committee), or nature observation may be carried out freely,” we read in the justification.
The problem, however, is that in almost every case the committee will be able to consider that the river’s rights have been violated. Who will sit on it? In total, there will be 15 people. The minister for the environment will have one representative, Polish Waters – two. Three seats will go to local government representatives, and three people will be indicated by the most important users of the Oder. Meanwhile, six seats will be allocated to activists from social organisations. Inevitably, it is the latter who will have the decisive voice. If the act were passed, these 15 people – practically overnight – would gain influence over the lives of 16 million people living along the Oder and in its river basin.