Consult, Court: “Regional amnesty of illegitimate dams, violate landscape authorization”

The regulation of water barrier works – such as dams, fire-fighting systems and artificial snowmaking of ski slopes – assigned to the Regions on the basis of their size, cannot provide for the amnesty of works that have been carried out in the absence of the landscape authorization or in deviation from it. This was established by the Constitutional Court with sentence no. 201, filed today (editor Augusto Antonio Barbera). The ruling, while reaffirming the competence of the Regions in the matter of smaller water barrier works, with reference to both their construction and their supervision, declares the unconstitutionality – among others – of Article 11 of Venetian law no. 23/2020. This is the provision with which the Veneto region had allowed the owners or managers of dams previously “not reported” or “built in deviation from the approved projects” to regularize them. The Court held that this provision conflicts with the protection of the environment because the broad and indistinct reference to the abusive works it contains is suitable for including those carried out in the absence or in violation of the landscape authorization, of which, therefore, ends up allowing an ‘amnesty’. But the regularization of the works from a landscape point of view – explained the Court – concerns the protection of the environment and the ecosystem, and is therefore reserved to the competence of the state legislator, who allowed it only in the mandatory cases provided for by the code of cultural heritage. The extension of these hypotheses by the Veneto region therefore constitutes a violation of a uniform environmental protection institute, valid throughout the national territory.