NEWS AND VIEWS

Yurii Kostenko invited to speak at international symposium in U.S.

by Natalie Mason Gawdiak

WASHINGTON - The Library of Congress and the New York University School of Law will co-sponsor an international symposium titled "Democracy and the Rule of Law in a Changing World Order" as a part of the library's bicentennial series and NYU's Global Law Faculty program.

The event, which will take place first at the Library of Congress in Washington on March 7-9 and then continue on March 10 at NYU Law School in Manhattan, is free and open to the public, with no registration or fees required. Ukrainian Verkhovna Rada member and Rukh leader Yurii Kostenko will present a paper at the symposium, whose participant list includes three U.S. Supreme Court justices and other judges from abroad, professors of law and political science, and other experts from around the world, including Nedezhda Mihailova, foreign minister of Bulgaria, and Alexander N. Domrin, senior research fellow from the Institute of Legislation and Comparative Law in Moscow.

In all, 21 nations will be represented at the symposium. The purpose of the conference is to examine how democracy and the rule of law have progressed throughout the world and to analyze the successes, failures and future challenges facing lawmakers in attempting to address common societal problems around the globe.

Because of his background in dealing with the consequences of the Chornobyl disaster as minister of environmental protection, Dr. Kostenko was invited to present a paper for the environmental panel, which will take place on Wednesday, March 8, from 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress Jefferson Building. The panel, one of seven on various topics, concerns "Natural Resources and the Environment: Individual versus Community Interests." Each panel consists of three paper presenters; the two other presenters on the environmental panel will be Richard Stewart, a law professor from New York University's School of Law, and Antonio Azuela, attorney general for environmental protection with the federal government of Mexico.

The commentator for the environmental panel is Sidney Draggan, senior science and science policy advisor of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the moderator is Koichiro Fujikura, a professor from Tezukayama University, faculty of law and policy, Nara, Japan, who is currently teaching at NYU Law School.

In the abstract of his presentation, "Natural Resources and Environment: Building Bridges for Humankind, Repaying the Debts We Owe to Nature," Dr. Kostenko notes in part that "the re-evaluation of values and a change in the orientation of global society in its relationship to nature, brought about by the cataclysms in the environment and its components, have been accompanied by the formation of new systems of eco-law and eco-policy. The reference here is to the vector of Rio - Agenda - 21 and 'Environment for Europe' processes, to systems of global and regional eco-conventions and international institutions, and to the growth of citizens' awareness and willingness of governments to take into account new realities that depend on their understanding of the exhaustibility and fragility of natural resources and living nature."

He argues that "the cardinal problem and most controversial element here is the ability of rich societies to balance the level of their profits and lifestyles in relation to the possibilities of the ecosystems of their countries and regions on the one hand, and on the other hand, the ability of poor nations not to take a leaf from the book of previous practices in which nature was used to exhaustion, but to search for sustainable development."

So that the public can familiarize itself with the issues in advance, the Library of Congress has posted all the abstracts of the presenters' papers, as well as the symposium schedule and participants' biographies and photographs on the library's bicentennial website located at: http://www.loc.gov/today/.

Natalie Mason Gawdiak is a research and information analyst with the Law Library of Congress.

Copyright © The Ukrainian Weekly, March 5, 2000, No. 10, Vol. LXVIII

| Home Page |