Thursday, February 15, 2018

25 years of Israeli environmental law?

A strange message hit my email inbox today, advertising an upcoming event hosted by an Israeli law school and a leading Israeli environmental NGO to celebrate 25 years of Israeli environmental law.

I'm more than a little puzzled by this as I'm not sure how exactly they came up with 1993 (or thereabouts) as the beginning of Israeli environmental law. Important environmental statutes, including the Regulation of Trades and Industries Ordinance, 1927; Oil in Navigable Waters Ordinance, 1936; Public Health Ordinance, 1940; Wild Animal Protection Law, 1955; Abatement of Nuisances Law, 1961; and the 1971 water pollution amendments to the Water Law (itself enacted in 1959) all predate 1993 by quite a bit. The Abatement of Environmental Nuisances Law, 1992 more or less fits the timing, but it happens to be a pretty unused (and useless) law. (I've written about a number of these statutes in a book chapter, "A Prolonged Recessional" (Academia and SSRN).)
Old Knesset (parliament) building on King George Street, Jerusalem
If court decisions are what the organizers have in mind, the early '90s again seem like an odd place to start, given earlier cases such as the 1959 public trust doctrine case Puterman v AG, a series of 1960s Supreme Court cases on air pollution, and so on.

It may be that the organizers have in mind the founding of said environmental NGO (Adam Teva V'din), founded circa 1990, though one might be forgiven for thinking that to be a somewhat self-centered view.

So I'm stumped.

1 comment: