The Standing Committee of the Berne Convention rejected this weekend a further denunciation of the Bulgarian "green" by which they tried to stop the construction of the Struma Motorway through the Kresna Gorge, wrote “Trud”.
The Committee accepted the arguments of the Bulgarian State representatives - experts with the Ministry of Environment and Water and the Ministry of Regional Development. As early as March, the "green" began the defamation campaign by writing to the Committee letters full of lies and manipulations about the construction of a motorway through the Kresna Gorge. After the Bulgarian court finally ruled that there was no problem with the Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) of Struma‘s Lot 3.2 and the public procurement contract was announced, the attack on the state and the project intensified. The “green” sent to the Strasbourg Committee meeting Andrey Kovatchev, Daniel Popov and Irina Mateeva who wrote slanderous letters together with another "environmentalist" - Petko Kovachev, who was not present. Today, the three tried to persuade the Committee that the so-called "Struma" case file have to be opened. Following stormy debates, the Standing Committee of the Berne Convention decided that there would be no external assessment of the EIS of lot 3.2 in 2017 and rejected the request to send a mission to investigate the case. The file remains closed at least until the end of 2019, when the construction of Struma Motorway through the gorge should already be started - that is, there were no obstacles to its start. In 1991, Bulgaria joined the Berne Convention, which guarantees compliance with environmental legislation in Europe. The decisions of Berne Convention‘s Committee have a serious weight and the European Commission usually takes them into account. If the slander of the “green” were accepted as true, Brussels would hardly approve the funding of Lot 3.2 and Bulgaria would be late in building a motorway, part of the Pan-European Transport Corridor Number 4 linking Germany and Greece. In such a situation, our state had to reimburse all the 1.5 billion leva given by the EC for the Motorway. According to the "eastern version" approved by the Bulgarian authorities, Lot 3.2 will be divided into two routes. The Motorway to Greece will pass through the Kresna Gorge with the current road being refurbished and expanded. The road to Sofia will pass via Kresna Plateau. In this way, the traffic through the gorge will be reduced by at least 50%, and traffic accidents are expected to decrease dramatically. Currently, the road through the Kresna Gorge is one of the most deadly in Bulgaria. Source: blitz.bg 
