Resources for Advocates

The following summary emphasizes portions of the National Green Tribunal (Tribunal) judgments and orders that address plastic pollution in the River Ganga. Through these orders and many others, the Tribunal also imposed strict orders concerning industrial pollution, sewage treatment, waste disposal and other activities contributing to river pollution.

The government of India has a constitutional duty to protect communal water bodies, and the people of India have a right to a healthy environment which encompasses access to water; therefore, the government may not allocate these vital resources to private third-parties for development. Construction of artificial, replacement water bodies will not suffice because the environment cannot be resuscitated by “merely filling a hole with water elsewhere.”

Although the initial coal-mining operations were authorized in 1983, which makes them and subsequent modifications (including the proposed modification to expand operations by diverting Arroyo Bruno) exempt from the current legal framework requiring and governing environmental impact assessment (in accordance with the transitional legal framework contemplated in Law 99 of 1993), the Constitutional Court determined that the impacts of the stream-diversion project have not been sufficiently assessed to guarantee the affected communities’ rights to water, food, and health. The Court concluded that there are several uncertainties regarding the social and environmental impacts of the stream-diversion project and the potential threats they pose to the affected communities’ rights to water, food security, and health due to the authorities’ failure to adequately identify or estimate relevant variables before authorizing the stream-diversion project. Thus, the Court upheld a lower court’s injunction suspending activities related to the stream-diversion project until the following orders are complied with by a judicially created Inter-Institutional Workgroup composed of governmental and non-governmental actors: (1) ensure the participation in said Workgroup of civil society and academic actors that intervened in the judicial proceedings; (2) identify and assess the uncertainties related to the stream-diversion project in order to establish the measures that should be adopted; (3) within a month of notification of this sentence, develop a detailed schedule of the activities to be carried out, as well as the specific actor responsible for carrying out each activity, in order to identify and assess the uncertainties related to the stream-diversion project; (4) in case the Workgroup determines the stream-diversion project is environmentally viable, incorporate the conclusions resulting from its technical study of uncertainties into Cerrejón’s Integral Management Plan so that Cerrejón adopts measures to prevent, mitigate, control, compensate, and correct environmental and social impacts.

The State of Washington has violated Tribes' off-reservation fishing rights by building and maintaining culverts under State roads that harm fish habitat and reduce the production of fish. Because (1) currently there is not enough harvestable salmon available to ensure the Tribes a moderate living, (2) the State’s culverts block roughly a thousand miles of streams suitable for salmon habitat, and (3) replacing or modifying those culverts (structures built to allow streams to flow under roads) to allow fish passage would produce several hundred thousand additional mature salmon each year, the State was ordered to identify all state-owned barrier culverts and ensure those culverts allow fish passage (by differentiated deadlines depending on several ecological and economic considerations).

A utility company violated the Clean Water Act when it disposed of coal ash into unlined ponds, which leaked contaminants via groundwater to an adjacent river. The court directed the utility company to excavate the coal ash and move it to a dry lined disposal location.

The National Green Tribunal fined a pulp and paper mill for discharging pollution into a tributary of the Gola River. Although there are other facilities that contribute to the pollution problem, the pulp and paper mill was still held liable.