Breaking News - positive results in the parliamentary vote on the amended Mining Law. Environmental safeguards now built in.

The text of an email received from Samo Pacenovsky and Jozef Suchta of SOSNA is reproduced below:

"Hi David,

Yesterday I could not find any exact information about the voting.

Latest news this morning is that the voting did not take place on 27th November, because there were too many laws to be discussed..... and was postponed to today, 29th November.

The voting has just taken place. Just now is speaking by Jozef Suchta, our lawyer moment in contact with the parliament by telephone.

There is one very positive piece of news - and one less positive.

The good news is, that the mining law was accepted by the parliament together with our amendments (102 votes for; nil against; 6 abstentions) !!!!

The less good news is, that the proposal of Mr. Juris about exclusion of the limestone resources in the Slovak karst was not accepted by the parliament by just 1 vote, 55 votes were not enough, we needed at least 56!

We would like to express our big thanks to everybody, who supported our campaign, especially to the whole Proact team and other people worldwide, who supported our efforts.

Our lawyer will continue to lobby for further improvents to our legislation.

Best wishes,

Samo Pacenovsky, Jozef Suchta"

On behalf of Proact I would like to add my thanks to those of Samo Pacenovsky and Jozef Suchta of SOSNA.

In the short time available the support mustered was impressive. The official Proact Team mails went out with 320 signatories. In addition we recorded 73 other individual mails which were copied to us. There were undoubtedly others.

The response - and the result - are an encouragement and an endorsement of our efforts.

We are confident that the Proact Team, and all our other occasional supporters worldwide will record further successes.

David Conlin
Proact Coord

Proact © David Conlin 2001