Ireland's Bid To Shut UK Nuclear Plant Stalled
Date: 19-Jan-06
Country: BELGIUM
Ireland says radioactive waste from the Sellafield fuel plant, built in northwestern Britain in the 1990s to loud objections from environmentalists, is polluting the Irish Sea and brought the case to a tribunal under a UN maritime law.
But the European Commission said Ireland should not have complained to the UN tribunal because the dispute concerns mainly European Union agreements and should have been dealt with in European courts.
The question of which institution has jurisdiction over Ireland's concerns is complicated further because the European Commission itself is party to the UN Law of the Sea, the maritime agreement that Ireland says its neighbour broke.
The Commission took its case against Ireland to the European Court of Justice (ECJ), Europe's highest court.
"In (the advisor's) view, where even a part of the dispute is governed by EC law, the ECJ is the competent forum," the court said of the advocate general's opinion.
The opinion of the advocate general is a recommendation to the ECJ, which follows the advice in most cases.
It prompted a strong reaction from one Irish MEP, Liam Aylward, who serves on the European Parliament's Environment Committee and is a former Irish government minister.
"The Irish government is very disappointed by this decision ... We will fight it all the way and feel this judgement is based on a flimsy and very technical interpretation," he told Reuters.
"One could be forgiven for thinking cynically that this was a European court making a decision about a case regarding a European institution," said the MEP, whose constituency is in eastern Ireland, bordering the Irish Sea.
The plant at Sellafield reprocesses spent nuclear fuel, containing plutonium dioxide and uranium dioxide, into a new fuel called mixed oxide fuel (MOX).
(With additional reporting by Darren Ennis in Strasbourg)