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The Battle Continues....
Minke Whale - just one of the species in the Irish Sea off the West Coast of Cumbria
Firstly a massive thank you to all of you who have generously donated to the CrowdJustice campaign and signed the petition against seismic testing in the irish sea. Without your help Radiation Free Lakeland would not have been able to take these first steps in raising the alarm and trying to stop such a terrible atrocity to our natural world.
Your donations enabled us to cover Leigh Day’s legal team’s discounted fees. Leigh Day provided us with initial legal advice on the prospects of a judicial review of the Marine Management Oranisation licensing decisions. That initial advice was an essential pre-requisite to any legal claim.
The funding covered the legal team’s advice and preparation of a pre-action letter, as well as their analysis of the Marine Management Organisation's and Nuclear Waste Service' responses
Based on Leigh Day’s detailed analysis unfortunately the advice is that the prospects of success did not merit the costs of bringing the judicial review at this stage. But this is not the end of the road.
A major factor was that the Marine Management Organisation had disclosed key documents very late and only awarded the European Protected Species licence within a few weeks of the proposed start date of the seismic surveys.
That timetable has made it extremely difficult to launch the judicial review in time to secure an injunction, and without the injunction any legal challenge would serve little purpose, because in all likelihood the seismic survey would have been completed before the legal case was resolved. Injunctions are in practice only granted when the underlying prospects of success are good.
So this combination of factors has made any judicial review very difficult to proceed with. However, this is not the end of the road but the beginning of a long haul.
We will continue to fight this plan, in which seismic blasting is ‘only’ the first stage, to use the deep geology of the Irish Sea to house the most dangerous nuclear wastes.
Thanks to all of you we have stood against the seismic blasting which otherwise would have gone unnoticed, unopposed and under the radar.
The leftover funds from this CrowdJustice campaign will be set aside for future legal cases on the same issue of Geological Disposal, potentially including further Marine Management licencing issues and the impacts of seismic blasting on our increasingly threatened marine life.