An interview with Hungary's first Parliamentary Commissioner for Future Generations
By Nathan Johnson
What in your professional background led you to this position?
It's mostly my training and experience as a public-interest environmental lawyer. The criteria for the position created under the Ombudsman Act are really quite narrow. For example, it requires a minimum of ten years of actual practice, and I believe that no more than six or seven persons in Hungary were eligible. One reason for this is that Hungary has yet to establish 'environmental law' as a profession. I think this will happen eventually, as at least two or three of the country's main law faculties do include some components of environmental education in their curricula.
I had the opportunity to read some highlights from the Ombudsman Office's first annual report. When was the official one-year anniversary?
I was elected on May 26, 2008. So last May marked our first year of existence, so to speak, but at the beginning I was completely on my own, and it took about six months to recruit staff - currently 36 people - and to create an internal structure. This involved things like writing a budget proposal to the Ministry of Finance. In other words, we started from scratch. So our first 'annual' report really covers the first one-and-a-half years of activity.
Tell us something about the various roles and services that your office performs.
Our office has three functions. The first two are historically ombudsman-type functions, and this draws from a tradition that was created in 1808 in Sweden. A bicentennial celebration took place last year in Stockholm.
First of all, this is a complaint office. We provide an inexpensive legal remedy, which is why people sometimes choose us instead of going to court. Naturally, we lack executive branch-type powers. We are rather a parliamentary advisory body on constitutional matters. But what's special about this first function is that, even if a decision can be interpreted to be true to the letter of the law, we can challenge the constitutional 'spirit' of the law in question, and suggest that it violates, say, the right of future generations to a healthy environment.
Our second function is parliamentary advocacy. We offer opinion on legal drafts and draw up plans, policies and programmes concerning the environment. Many kinds of administration are tied in some way to environment, and whether it involves water management, agricultural land use, construction, air traffic or mining, we try to interpret these relations in an extensive way - to either fill in various cracks or open up rigidly defined borders. In our first annual report one can see that we've been successful in achieving some results to this end. But, in other instances, various parliamentary commissions don't even send us their first drafts or invite us for debate. They might have done so the beginning, but they've stopped for one reason or other.
I should mention here that we have to strike a careful balance between stepping in when it matters and making a difference, and in keeping an appropriate distance - to not be seen as constantly interfering. Otherwise, we could jeopardise in some circles any feeling of willingness to engage in dialogue. And in this regard, the environment is the most delicate and intricate issue. But one hopes that people can grow used to constructive criticism - to not just find it annoying. Of course, we're not perfect either.
The latter is perhaps the most interesting, and right now there are between 30 and 40 communities in Hungary striving to be sustainable in one way or another. Some of the biggest issues here are local electricity production or water management. Then there are issues of sustainable living and food security.
Hungary's Ombudsman Act required a two-thirds majority for passage, and a further two-thirds majority is needed for approval of a candidate nominated for the office of Parliamentary Commissioner, so this wasn't an easy thing to get off the ground, was it?
No, it wasn't. Boldizsár Nagy was the first person that President [László] Sólyom nominated for the position, and that nomination failed. I was the second person nominated, and that failed. Then the nomination of a third candidate, Ágnes Mészáros, also failed. Finally, President Sólyom just said: 'Alright, I'll keep nominating the person who received the most votes in a previous nomination.' That was me, and next time the nomination succeeded. The fact that I am able to serve a six-year term provides me with a certain degree of independence outside of the normal four-year cycle of Hungarian general elections.
To venture something of an understatement, Hungary's principal rival parties don't exactly see eye-to-eye on a number of issues. Is there any sense of a broader political consensus, however, where environment and long-term thinking are concerned?
I can make a couple of points here. Hungarians tend to be a rather pessimistic lot, and so elections - instead of representing political opportunity - are viewed by many as a just another political tragedy. This being the case, our office has attempted from the very beginning to urge rival parties to establish, at the very least, some sort of environmental minimum standard, and not to bargain or conduct a race to the bottom - that is, to protect things like climate, biodiversity, drinking water, agricultural land, and to protect green areas from urban sprawl and so forth.
The other point, and which came as a surprise to us, is that in working with the Parliamentary Environmental Committee, in most every case we have received almost unanimous support - that is, with minimal or no resistance from government opposition members. On at least half a dozen notable occasions we have been in agreement on basic environmental issues. And there are even instances in which necessary consultation with the [Parliamentary Environmental] Committee proved to be helpful in amending the drafts of laws - regarding gene banks and food concerns, for example.
What are some of the highlights and disappointments that you've experienced while leading this new office?
One of the things I'm most proud of, and which I just mentioned, is how quickly the Environmental Committee accepted us. Very quickly there was a memorandum of understanding drawn up between us and another parliamentary body, the Parliamentary Sustainable Development Commission. Also, outsider professional and environmental organisations continually approach us with various issues, as they're looking for any kind of unified leverage against the powerful interests, such as the 'big [fossil] energy' and nuclear lobbies. We have also in the past 18 months been asked or invited to participate in approximately 150 conferences - and not just as spectators! We have really been allowed to become part of a growing network of voices.
As far as individual cases are concerned, I'm particularly proud of our statement regarding the proposed Szerencs Power Plant. [This 50mw biomass facility near Hungary's famous Tokaj wine-growing region, if completed, would be country's largest, but the project has met with huge resistance from local citizens and environmental groups. - Ed.] The statement that our office produced was the result of complex and concentrated study, and it had several wide-ranging effects, even if we weren't able to achieve a desired breakthrough immediately. As things stand now, the case at the Supreme Court for an extraordinary legal remedy.
I am also happy with the result that we were successful in helping to protect a number of historic buildings in Budapest's former Jewish Quarter, which some city government officials had quite shamelessly handed over to investors and property developers, who in turn had pulled down or rebuilt them with no regard for preserving the original architecture.
In both these cases we produced 40- to 50-page analyses, and were able to raise the profiles of both the Szerencs-Tokaj region and the Jewish Quarter as World Heritage buffer zones, and to help revive a stalemated debate on establishing the Hungarian World Heritage Act. We always hope to be involved at some intermediary stage of a negotiation because it's much more difficult to affect important changes when something is finalised as legislation. Getting involved with or providing input for environmental impact assessments (EIAs) or strategic environmental assessments (SEASs) is vital, because sometimes the people putting these together don't always understand how many different things are connected, whether it's transboundary impact, or the transport footprint on a region that opens a new facility, or something else.
So, one could say that your office is focused as much on process as the results achieved?
Precisely. If we can consistently do a good job of providing reliable information and making sound arguments, we can in the short term become a widely acknowledged part of the network, and therefore build up long-term credibility.
Increasing urbanisation is a worldwide trend, and smog pollution in Budapest has emerged as a real health problem. Nonetheless, local government has been unwilling to enforce its own 'smog alert' traffic restrictions. What can be done to address this?
The best thing we can do in our capacity is to make widely available the best information and public health data. We plan to release such data in the coming year, but it's really quite strange to think that people are already widely aware of this problem. We sit here right above Nádor Street [in downtown Pest, not far from Parliament - Ed.], above lots of traffic, and it's quite unhealthy. And yet there are still demographic groups in this city, or this region - say, males between the ages of 25 and 50 - who feel that it's a form of humiliation to ride public transport. This is a difficult problem to overcome.
You mention in the annual report that you have collaborated with, among various international institutions, a collective known as the Balaton Group. What is this rather mysterious-sounding entity?
Oh, that's a great subject. This collection of the world's leading environmental scientists and systems thinkers had their first meeting here in 1972. And it really is an international group. On two or three occasions they have met elsewhere, but Hungary is the usual meeting place. And it was such a well-kept secret that even I didn't know until recently about this local gathering.
The Balaton Group always has one major topic of orientation when they get together. A morning session consists of three or four lectures from really top people. In the afternoons and evenings they just sit together and take part in informal discussions. The central topic on this occasion was 'system': system in environmental education, system in environmental planning, et cetera.
This is one really beautiful aspect of being part of a network, whether it's scientific, civic or political. The legal tools are now available for us and other network members to expand mechanisms to safeguard protected environments around the world. And this is one of reasons why I love networking.
