Espoo Convention

In this joint letter, 18 members of the European Parliament, Nuclear Transparency Watch and CEE Bankwatch Network are asking the European Commission, as an opinion-making party of relevant international conventions, to provide leadership and express its clear support for the findings of relevant committees during the upcoming Meetings of Parties of Espoo Convention in June and of the Aarhus Convention in September, in favour of a coherent application of the Espoo and Aarhus Conventions to nuclear lifetime extensions.

Espoo bodies sent several specific recommendations concerning its non-compliance with the Espoo Convention to Ukraine. Nonetheless Ukraine seems to be either ignoring those or taking insufficient steps towards compliance. Therefore Bankwatch summarises the state-of-play in this letter and asks the Implementation Committee to consider a number of steps to ensure the Convention’s requirements are properly met by Ukraine.

In this letter, Bankwatch asks the European Commission to reconsider the disbursement of the Euratom and EBRD loans for the Ukraine nuclear safety upgrade programme that effectively enables the lifetime extensions at Ukraine's nuclear reactors. The letter provides evidence for the intertwined character of the upgrade programme and the lifetime extensions and for Ukraine's refusal to meet its obligations under international conventions.

The EBRD has denied its role in enabling Ukraine’s ageing units to operate beyond their design lifetime. It has also claimed that through the loan it has important leverage over its client Energoatom to help ensure a proper level of nuclear safety and the compliance with Ukraine’s international commitments in the nuclear energy sector. However, developments in January-May 2015 show the EBRD has been over-optimistic about the role and leverage it has gotten by granting the loan for the safety upgrade project.