Fiala and Morawiecki are to sign an agreement on the Turów mine in Prague
Czech Prime Minister Petr Fiala (ODS) and his Polish counterpart Mateusz Morawiecki in Prague on Thursday approved an agreement on the Polish mine Turów. Intensive negotiations on the text of the agreement have taken place in secret in recent days. The governments of both countries were approved without the attention of the media and the public.
According to the daily Aktuálně.cz, the final form of the agreement is very similar to the wording that leaked to the public at the end of September last year. Expert teams from the environment and abroad have been working on it since the summer.
But in the end, the prime ministers themselves had to sanctify a compromise on two points. First of all, how much money will Prague receive from Warsaw in compensation for the impacts on the Czech territory – mainly on groundwater reserves, but also because of the noise and dust that mines brown coal in the surface mine useful. And secondly, how long will the obligations under the contract be enforceable. At this point, Prague demands a period of ten years and the Polish side two years.
according to information from both sides of the negotiations, the resulting compromise is compensation in the amount of 45 million euros (over a billion crowns). For them, municipalities on the Czech side of the border in the Liberec Region should build infrastructure ensuring access to drinking water. The ones in the vicinity of the mine are also disappearing due to ongoing mining, they agree with the expert analysis.
Compliance with the contract should then be monitored by the Court of Justice of the European Union for a period of five years.
“Negotiations on Turów will continue during Morawiecki’s visit to Prague today,” a Polish government spokesman said.
The Czech participants did not want to comment on the current state of play before the meeting of the two prime ministers. “We will fine-tune the last things. I assume that we will be able to roll this heavy boulder in Czech-Polish relations,” said Fiala. “I believe today,” he told CTK.
Martin Půta, Governor of the Liberec Region, the daily Aktuálně.cz confirmed that he is also heading to a meeting in Prague, similarly to his Polish counterpart Cezary Przybylski, who heads the Lower Silesian Voivodeship.
After many years of ambiguity and months of intense negotiations, the agreement should come on the day when the Advocate General of the Court of Justice of the EU also published his opinion on the continuation of mining at the Turów mine. According to him, Poland suspended EU law when it did not sufficiently assess the impact of new work near the Czech border on the environment. In addition, it did not provide the Czech Republic with sufficient information.
“Poland has failed to fulfill its obligations under the principle of loyal cooperation (with the Czech Republic)” or “the requirements of the spirit of solidarity, cooperation and mutual support between the Member States of the European Union,” the lawyer wrote in his opinion. The court is due to deliver a final verdict in the spring, with the tribunal usually following the opinion of its Advocate General.
Warsaw has long rejected the fact that it should be the Court of Justice of the EU, which will oversee in the coming years that the Polish and Czech sides comply with their obligations under the bilateral agreement. Poland has other disputes with this EU institution.
However, the Czech negotiators insisted on the condition. In exchange for approving the agreement, Prague promised to withdraw the lawsuit, on which the Advocate General commented on Thursday. Therefore, the verdict as such may not occur at all.
On the contrary, the court imposed a fine on Poland for refusing to suspend mining in Turów until the situation cleared up, Warsaw would have to pay anyway. At the moment, I am still offering him a penalty of half a million euros a day (almost 13 million crowns), which no one pays. Therefore, the court of Poland will deduct the first hundreds of millions of crowns from European subsidies.