Compliance of the legal framework for soil and water resources management in Serbia and some regional countries with the EU legislation

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to make a comparative analysis of the legislative framework for soil and water resource management in Serbia and some Balkan region countries with an established EU legislative framework and give recommendations to improve policy management in this area. The EU has developed a better legal framework for water resources in relation to the soil resources. The Water Framework Directive which was adopted in 2000 is the umbrella legislative framework for the later adoption of many important documents in the field of the water policy related to: the river basin management, flood protection, water quality protection and others. In 2006 the EU adopted the Soil Thematic Strategy, a very important document in the context of the management of soil resources that had emerged as a need to protect the basic functions of soil threatened by severe degradation processes. The Strategy included a proposal for the Soil Framework Directive, but unfortunately, this Directive has not been adopted yet. After adaptation of the EU Water Framework Directive, Serbia adopted the Water Law, which is partly harmonized with the EU Directive and has several significant drawbacks. The soil protection provisions in Serbia could be found in several laws: the Law of Agricultural Land, the Law on Environmental Protection and other legal and strategic documents. The most important law concerning soil protection in Serbia was the Law on Soil Protection adopted in December 2015. In addition to the analysis of the soil and water legal framework in Serbia, this paper analyzes the laws that have been enacted in the area of these two resources so far and their compliance with the EU directives, as well as those laws enacted in some countries in the region. From the neighboring countries, the analysis was carried out for Macedonia, Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina and Croatia. The selection of these countries was carried out for several reasons: firstly these countries are the former Republics of Yugoslavia, which had the same legal framework that has evolved in different ways, being more or less compliant with the legal framework of the EU.