Litigation: Landmark SCA win for environmentalists The SCA this week ordered steel producer ArcelorMittal SA to hand over environmental information to lobby group the Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance (Veja), says a Business Day report. It adds the judgment is a victory for environmental organisations seeking to monitor the practices of private companies. On behalf of a unanimous Bench of five, the court’s Acting Deputy President, Mohamed Navsa, said local and international companies ‘must be left in no doubt’ that, when it came to the environment, there was ‘no room for secrecy’. ‘Constitutional values will be enforced,’ he said. Calling SA’s biggest steel producer a ‘major, if not the major, polluter’ in its operational areas, Navsa said ArcelorMittal SA’s industrial activities were a matter of public interest and were ‘crucially important’. While there was a danger in forcing companies to throw open their books in cases of ‘trivial’ or ‘frivolous’ requests, this case did not fall into that category. ‘It concerns us all,’ he said. According to the report, the court battle concerned two requests under the Promotion of Access to Information Act by Veja. Navsa had strong words for how the company had initially dealt with the requests for information, saying it was disingenuous because it had initially ‘feigned ignorance’ of the existence of a document called its Environmental Master Plan, which covered rehabilitation of its Vanderbijlpark site. Full Business Day report Company Secretary of ArcelorMittal South Africa v Vaal Environmental Justice Alliance (69/2014) From LSSA week144 28Nov14
Posted on: Sun, 07 Dec 2014 06:19:57 +0000