A dispensa do licenciamento ambiental prevista no projeto de lei n.º 3.729/2004: uma afronta aos princípios fundamentais do direito ambiental

Abstract

The Federal Constitution ensures that an ecologically balanced environment is a right of all and essential to a healthy quality of life, placing the protection of the environment as a duty of both individuals and the State. Therefore, environmental licensing emerges as one of the most important instruments for environmental protection and preservation. This instrument is a means of controlling and overseeing activities that are actual or potentially polluting, i.e., that generate or may generate risks to the environment. In this manner, environmental licensing embodies fundamental tenets of environmental law, such as the principles of prevention, precaution, sustainable development, and prohibition of environmental regression, making it indispensable for a specific activity or undertaking to undergo the scrutiny of environmental licensing. Under the pretext that there is a need for a general law regulating this instrument, Bill No. 3,729/04 recently passed in the Chamber of Deputies and now awaits analysis by the Federal Senate. The bill aims to establish a general law for environmental licensing; however, it contains an extensive list of activities that are exempt from environmental licensing, arguing that there is a delay in the country's economic development due to the sluggishness and bureaucracy of the process. From this standpoint, the objective of this work is to analyze how these measures challenge the fundamental tenets of environmental law.