Parliamentary Opposition Parties Petition EC to Abandon Jadar Project

Jadar Valley(Photo:PrintScreen YouTube)

The parliamentary opposition parties in Serbia sent a letter on April 2 to the European Commission (EC), with a request for the abandonment of the “Jadar” project and a dismissal of the request of the Rio Tinto company for it to be granted the status of “strategic project” in the EU.

“We are drawing attention to the fact that, for the past year, a group of most eminent experts in various fields had thoroughly analyzed the available documentation that the Rio Sava Exploration company has presented as the ‘Jadar’ project, and had concluded that the company did not possess a single document required for fulfilling the demands for mining, set by the laws of Serbia,” the letter reads.

It was added in the letter that the company had not created the preliminary design for the planned mine, that it had not performed the feasibility study, or the environmental impact study. The opposition further pointed out that the company’s exploration activities in the previous period had been performed in violation of Serbian law.

“Under pressure from the public, and during the election campaign, the government abolished the Decree on the spatial plan for the ‘Jadar’ project in 2022. After the elections, talk about the project was revived and, in 2024, the Constitutional Court ruled that the government’s decision to abolish the spatial plan was unconstitutional,” it was declared in the letter.