SANTA CRUZ DE TENERIFE, 23 Aug (EUROPA PRESS) –
The Contentious-Administrative Court of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) has declared void the concession of a public utility mountain to the Institute of Astrophysics of the Canary Islands (IAC) for the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), thus estimating the appeal presented by the Ben Magec Canary Islands Ecologist Federation.
“We believe that it has been the haste and complacency of the Island Council with the IAC that have once again led to a sloppy administrative procedure plagued with nullity vices. One of them, the fraud of the law, has been enough to invalidate the concession. The rest of the legal bases of our claim, those related to urban and environmental legality, we will enforce if the Cabildo files an appeal or if a concession for the construction of the TMT in this protected natural area is processed for the third time “, says the federation in a note.
Ben Magec specifies that the annulled concession is the one that the Cabildo processed in 2019 after being annulled by the same court of the previous land concession for the 2017 TMT.
Therefore, he points out, “it is already the second time that justice has ruled against the interest of the TIO Consortium, promoter of TMT, to have an alternative place on La Palma to the Hawaiian mountain Mauna Kea, which is the preferred location and where it has all the administrative and judicial permits, but with a strong social opposition determined to prevent its construction. “
For environmentalists, “the sentence puts the TMT back in the starting box from an administrative point of view since, since the concession of public forest is an authorization that is required prior to any other, everything that has been subsequently approved in basis for the annulled concession would be equally invalid “.
Along these lines, they state that the five years that the TIO consortium has lost on La Palma “should make you reflect on the arrogant and disrespectful strategy that they have carried out in both Hawaii and the Canary Islands, emboldened by institutional support and despising the arguments of the opposition to TMT “.
In his opinion, the consortium already knew in 2016 that its project contravenes all urban and environmental regulations that protect the area, “but they preferred to collude with the IAC and the administrations to modify the laws in their own interest, in the purest style of the urban corruption “.
EXCESS OF URBAN DEVELOPMENT
Thus, they point out that “to deactivate all the protection regulations they added a provision of dubious constitutionality in the Canary Islands Land Law of 2017, a provision that, to make matters worse, they have failed to comply with the annulled concession, as established in the sentence” .
Ecologists defend their “determination” to defend the natural and cultural heritage of the peaks of La Palma and insist that the Roque de Los Muchachos area, a priority conservation area of the Natura 2000 Network and peripheral protection area of the Caldera National Park de Taburiente, “has already reached levels of urbanization inappropriate for this emblematic landscape, rich in biodiversity and archaeological sites”.
“We will firmly oppose the implementation of more elements alien to the nature of the place, such as the TMT, the Cherenkov Network or the European Solar Telescope,” they point out.
