» Lawyer Kim Young-hee, right, working on the behalf of a coalition of citizens seeking to have the Four Major Rivers Restoration Project declared unconstitutional and illegal, submits documents for a lawsuit to cancel planned river construction and injunctions to suspend the project to Seoul Administrative Court, Nov. 26.

Some 10,000 people nationwide are filing a suit to cancel the Four Major Rivers Restoration Project, which has been surrounded by controversy over its legality. A coalition of citizens seeking to have the project declared unconstitutional and illegal filed lawsuits to cancel planned river construction related to the Four Major Rivers Restoration Project and injunctions to suspend the project in four courts across the country, including Seoul Administrative Court and district courts in Busan, Daejeon and Jeonju.

The coalition held a press conference in the office of MINBYUN-Lawyers for a Democratic Society and called the Four Major Rivers Restoration Project a pure construction project that would not only block natural waterways with weirs and destroy river ecosystems through dredging, but also presents the danger of polluting drinking water. The coalition said they are filing the lawsuit to correct a wrongdoing and dangerous precedent set by the Lee administration that would destroy the land and disturb the rule of law. They said after they had considered the legality of the project, they confirmed that it is in fact in violation of the National Finance Law, Rivers and Creeks Law, Environmental Impact Evaluation Law and Cultural Properties Protection Law.

First, in terms of its violation of the National Finance Law, a national policy project costing over 50 billion Won must first undergo a prior investigation of its feasibility, but the coalition is saying that the Lee administration bypassed this. In March, the Lee administration changed the executive ordinance of the National Finance Law to widen the exclusion from prior investigation for “disaster restoration support” projects to “disaster prevention and restoration support” projects. Accordingly, they designated the Four Major Rivers Restoration Project as a disaster prevention project, in deliberate avoidance of a feasibility study.

The citizens’ coalition, however, believes that to be exempt from a study, the project must be an urgent one, but the Four Major Rivers Restoration Project does not satisfy this condition. Lawyer Jo Seong-oh says the Lee administration’s wanton changing of the National Finance Law’s executive ordinance to create grounds to exempt the project from a feasibility study without any regulations in the law itself could be in violation of the Constitution.

The coalition is also charging that the Lee administration’s master plan for the Four Major Rivers Restoration Project was drafted without taking legal measures under the Rivers and Streams Law into consideration. Moreover the law states that to draft a water control project, one must make detailed and sequential plans which include long-term water resource plans, comprehensive water control plans, basic plans for river valley water control. The coalition suspects, however, that in several of the construction zones including the Nakdong River, the Lee administration, in order to hasten construction, first set up basic plans for river valley water control and then set up comprehensive water control plans.

The coalition members also believe that since the environmental impact evaluation for the huge project, encompassing 1,200km of river valleys, was written and submitted in just three months, it violated the duties involved in such an evaluation, including on-site inspections and the use of the latest data and research tools. The same also goes for the cultural properties evaluation. The Nakdong River, for example, was finished in just two months without researching underwater areas, meaning that each researcher had evaluated 211,570 square meters of area per day. The coalition says that the environmental impact and cultural properties studies were poorly conducted, and therefore in violation of the Environmental Impact Evaluation Law and Cultural Properties Protection Law.

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