By CIVICUS
Jul 9 2025 –  
CIVICUS speaks to Cristinel Buzatu, regional legal advisor for Central and Eastern Europe at Greenpeace, about how Romania’s state gas company is weaponising the courts to silence environmental opposition.

Cristinel Buzatu

On 10 June, the state-owned energy giant Romgaz filed a lawsuit seeking to dissolve Greenpeace Romania. The legal attack came after the organisation campaigned against the company’s plans to exploit a Black Sea gas field. Politicians say the project is crucial for Romania’s energy independence and its ability to export gas to Moldova, while civil society is clear that fossil fuel extraction must stop to prevent runaway climate change. Romgaz withdrew the case just hours before the first hearing, but the lawsuit exposed how fossil fuel companies are exploiting legal loopholes to silence dissent, marking a dangerous escalation in corporate attacks on climate activists.

What’s the Neptun Deep project and why is Greenpeace challenging it?

The Neptun Deep project is the largest proposed fossil gas drilling project in the European Union (EU), and we’re fighting it on multiple fronts. Operated by Romgaz Black Sea Limited Nassau SRL and OMV Petrom SA in the Romanian Black Sea, this massive drilling operation threatens biodiversity, accelerates climate change and extreme weather and locks Romania and the EU into an outdated and harmful fossil fuel system.

Our legal challenge targets the project’s environmental permit. We asked the Bucharest Tribunal to suspend it, arguing the Constanța Environmental Protection Agency had approved it in breach of environmental law. The agency’s evaluation was superficial at best, relying on outdated data on the project’s climate impacts and greenhouse gas emissions. Crucially, they ignored its impacts on biodiversity and water bodies, failed to consider risks from potential military conflicts and bypassed meaningful public consultation. Key documents such as ecotoxicity tests and archaeological diagnostic reports were kept hidden from public scrutiny.

When the court rejected our application, it hit us with a massive bill of 150,000 lei (approx. US$34,550) in legal costs to each company. They had demanded even more.

How did Romgaz turn legal costs into a weapon?

Romgaz claimed we failed to pay those costs and were therefore insolvent, which is grounds for dissolving an organisation under Romanian law. They alleged we had no assets or bank accounts and were using several legal entities to avoid responsibility. But the truth is we’ve never received a formal payment notice. When we actively requested one, none came.

Yet Romgaz pressed ahead, filing for our dissolution while launching a media smear campaign. We prepared our defence, confident the facts would vindicate us, as Romgaz’s claims were demonstrably false. But we never got our day in court. Just hours before the first hearing, Romgaz abruptly withdrew the case. Even then, it publicly reaffirmed its accusations and vowed to try again. The strategy was clear: inflict maximum reputational damage while denying us any opportunity to defend ourselves.

Is this part of a broader attack on environmental groups?

Absolutely. This case exemplifies a troubling trend targeting civil society in Romania, particularly environmental groups that dare to use the courts. The playbook is simple: companies that win cases demand excessive legal costs. When organisations can’t pay, the companies pursue their dissolution on insolvency grounds.

We’ve seen this weapon deployed repeatedly. Take Militia Spirituala, a local organisation that was dissolved at the request of a real estate developer. The same developer also tried to shut down Salvati Bucurestiul over unpaid legal fees, although the organisation survived by paying up. Now that developer is suing several organisations for damages totalling a million euros.

The chilling effect is undeniable. While we lack exact figures on litigation rates, the reality speaks for itself: only a handful of organisations still dare to challenge corporate projects in court. Most have been scared off by the legal and financial risks. This amounts to a serious restriction on access to justice, and we urgently need to find ways to reverse this trend.

How did civil society fight back against Romgaz?

The response was immediate and powerful. Civil society recognised the Romgaz case for what it was: a textbook SLAPP – a strategic litigation against public participation. Within just 24 hours, over 25,000 people signed a petition condemning the attempt to silence us.

But the attack’s roots went deeper than one company’s aggression: it was a coordinated effort made from the highest levels of government. On 20 March, the Ministry of Energy held up the Energy Transfer lawsuit in the USA against three Greenpeace organisations as a model to emulate, explicitly encouraging national energy firms to launch similar legal assaults on environmental groups that challenge their projects. The message was unmistakable: the state stands with corporations against civil society.

This provoked unprecedented unity. Over 110 civil society organisations from diverse fields signed an open letter demanding the minister’s dismissal. Yet even this solidarity wasn’t enough to stop the attacks. In May, the minister openly welcomed Romgaz’s attempt to dissolve us, repeating baseless claims about our finances and structure – the same lies peddled in court.

Still, something remarkable has happened. Many people who have never supported us before reached out, saying that while they might not always agree with our campaigns, they recognised this legal action as pure intimidation. That support gives us strength to carry on, defend civic space and resist corporate capture of our democracy.

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SEE ALSO
The price of protest: Greenpeace hit with huge penalty CIVICUS Lens 09.Apr.2025
‘Energy Transfer’s lawsuit against Greenpeace is an attempt to drain our resources and silence dissent’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Daniel Simons 01.Apr.2025
Europe: ‘Member states must introduce national anti-SLAPP legislation to protect public watchdogs’ CIVICUS Lens | Interview with Francesca Borg Costanzi 21.Mar.2024

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By Aatreyee Dhar
ULAANBAATAR, Jul 9 2025 – Youth activist Gereltuya Bayanmukh still reflects on the events in her formative years that inspired her to become a climate activist. When she was a child, she would visit her grandparents in a village 20 km to the south of the border between Russia and Mongolia.

She was happy to see each of the nomadic people in their traditional gers power up their settlements using solar power.

“I remember seeing my neighbors own a solar panel and a battery to accumulate power. They were turning on lights and watching TV using solar power. Nowadays, they even have fridges,” she says.

She thought the herders made a conscious choice about their lifestyles and understood the need of the hour in the face of the looming climate crisis. That is to say, switch to renewable energy and power a safer future.

“This was the reason I became a climate activist,” she says.

No matter how unwitting her notion about her community achieving self-sufficiency with renewable energy was, the findings about what entailed this system revealed something else.

“I later learned that the solar panels were partially subsidized by the government as a part of the nationwide government to equip 100,000 nomadic households with solar energy,” she says.

What she perceived turned out to be a nationwide renewable energy scheme by the Mongolian government for the nomadic herders.

The scheme, called the National 100,000 Solar Ger [Yurt] Electricity Program, introduced in 2000, provided herders with portable photovoltaic solar home systems that complement their traditional nomadic lifestyle.

At least 30 percent of Mongolia’s population comprises nomadic herders. Before 2000, when the scheme came into effect, herders had limited or no access to modern electricity. By 2005, the government managed to equip over 30,000 herder families through funds from several donor nations.

However, the full-scale electrification effort for herders was beginning to stagnate. The 2006 midterm custom audit performance report by the Standing Committee on Environment, Food and Agriculture of the Parliament carried sobering revelations.

The scheme in its initial phase was poorly managed: there was no control over the distribution process, with some units delivered to local areas landing in the hands of non-residents violating the contract, failure to deliver the targeted number of generators, misappropriation of the program funds, and inability to repay the loans within the contractual period.

However, in the third phase–2006-2012–the program was able to expand its implementation with the support of several international donors, including the World Bank.

“At first, I thought how great that we started out with the renewable energy transition, giving access to renewable energy at a lower price. And it was even in 1999. That was when I was just four years old. I believe we were on our way to building a future like this. Like we visualized here. The future of green nomadism. However, my optimism faded when I read the midterm audit report and discovered that the program had been (just as) poorly managed as the first part. It was only with the assistance of the international partners that the program finished well,” says Gereltuya.

Gereltuya is the co-founder and board director of her NGO, Green Dot Climate, which focuses on empowering youth as climate activists and raising awareness and practical skills for climate action.

One of the mottoes of her NGO is to change the youth’s and Mongolian people’s attitudes and practices around climate change issues as well as solutions.

In the past year, the NGO has been successful in reaching over half a million Mongolians, including nomads, helping them become more environmentally conscious and empowering the youth to be climate activists—makers and doers themselves.

“In the past year, we have reached over half a million Mongolians. Our Green Dot youth community has logged more than 100,000 individual climate actions, saving over 700,000 kg of CO₂, 25 liters of water, and 80,000 kilowatt-hours of energy. Next, we will aim for a million collective actions, a stronger community and a minimum of 50 collaborative climate projects in Mongolia,” Gereltuya said during her delegate speech at the One Young World Summit, a global event that brings in young leaders from around the world to discuss global issues, in 2023.

The state of Mongolia’s nomads in the current energy system

Mongolia as a country heavily relies on coal for energy production, which contributes to 90 percent of its energy production. Coming to just transition, the government aims for a 30 percent renewable energy share by 2030 of its installed capacity, as enshrined in the State Policy on Energy 2015-2030. Mongolia is also committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 22.7 percent by 2030 while the energy sector accounts for 44.78 percent of the total emissions as of 2020 according to Mongolia’s Second Biennial Update Report.

Gereltuya’s NGO, Green Dot Climate, has been mapping Mongolia’s energy systems for the past few years now. As of 2024, Mongolia’s electricity sector relies on CHP [combined heat and power] plants and imports from Russia and China to meet its electricity demands.

Only 7 percent of its total installed energy comes from renewable sources, with the Central Energy System accounting for over 80 percent of the total electricity demand. “We found that about 200,000 households remain unaccounted for in the centralized energy grid calculations. These are likely the same nomadic families or their later generations who likely adopted their first solar systems at least two decades ago,” she explains.

Gereltuya says that her organisation meticulously compared the recent household data cited by the Energy Regulatory Commission of Mongolia to that of the total  number of households as per the Mongolian Statistical Information Service to find the numbers that went missing

Mongolia’s backslide into fossil-fuel economy

Although Mongolia has promised to increase its renewable energy share to 30 percent by 2030, it is still far behind in the race to achieve its target.

In the 2020 Nationally Determined Contribution [NDC] submission to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC], Mongolia set its mitigation target to “a 22.7% reduction in total national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 2030,” which can increase to a 27.2 percent reduction if conditional mitigation measures such as the carbon capture and storage and waste-to-energy technology are implemented. Further, if “actions and measures to remove GHG emissions by forest are determined”, the total mitigation target would rise to 44.9 percent by 2030.

“Instead of focusing on decarbonizing its coal-based economy, Mongolia shifted to focus on carbon-sink and sequestration processes to reduce its emissions. This suggests that despite our many promises, policies and past efforts to mainstream renewables, we may still end up with business as usual. A case of bad governance, stagnation and vicious cycles,” she says.

Recommendations for Mongolia’s energy sector

Gereltuya’s NGO has been actively engaged in the survey ‘Earth Month 2025’ that is aimed at collecting specific recommendations from the youth voices in the country for the NDC 3.0 that the government is expected to submit in COP30. She shares a few recommendations that she believes can help improve the country’s energy systems.

On the demand side, households not connected to the grid should update and improve their solar home systems, especially now that the solutions are much cheaper and more efficient.

According to the 2024 World Bank ‘Mongolia Country Climate and Development Report,’ the average residential tariff for electricity in Mongolia was estimated to be 40 percent below cost recovery, and subsidies were worth 3.5 percent of GDP in 2022. The lack of cost recovery created hurdles in efforts to enhance energy efficiency and investment in renewable energy. In the context, those connected to the grid should pay more for their energy use to reflect the real cost of energy production and support renewable energy feed-in tariffs. There should be responsible voting of citizens demanding better policies and implementations and not trading in policies for short-term gains.

On the supply side, there is a need to stop new fossil fuel projects immediately: there are at least six such projects, including one international project under Mongolia’s current Energy Revival Policy, underway.

Secondly, Mongolia’s electricity infrastructure needs significant improvement. As the UNDP recently highlighted, Mongolia’s infrastructure is aging, inefficient and heavily subsidized.

Thirdly, fully utilize installed energy capacity, which is at only 30 percent, largely owing to the infrastructure inefficiency.

Fourth is to increase the overall renewable energy capacity five times to meet demand, which means 15 times the energy made in full demand. And phase out coal-based power, replacing it with fully renewable energy.

IPS UN Bureau Report

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By Norman Solomon
SAN FRANCISCO, USA, Jul 9 2025 – Whatever the outcomes of Benjamin Netanyahu’s visit to the White House on Monday and the latest scenario for a ceasefire in Gaza, a bilateral policy of genocide has united the Israeli and U.S. governments in a pact of literally breath-taking cruelty.

That pact and its horrific consequences for Palestinian people either continue to shock Americans or gradually normalize indifference toward ongoing atrocities on a massive scale.

Recent news reporting that President Trump has pushed for a ceasefire in Gaza is an echo of a familiar refrain about peace-seeking efforts from the Biden and Trump administrations. The spin remained in sync with the killing – not only with American bombs and bullets but also with Israel’s refusal to allow more than a pittance of food and other essentials into Gaza.

Last year began with a United Nations statement that “Gazans now make up 80 per cent of all people facing famine or catastrophic hunger worldwide, marking an unparalleled humanitarian crisis in the Gaza Strip amid Israel’s continued bombardment and siege.” The UN quoted experts who said: “Currently every single person in Gaza is hungry, a quarter of the population are starving and struggling to find food and drinkable water, and famine is imminent.”

In late February 2024, President Biden talked to journalists about prospects for a “ceasefire” (which did not take place) while holding a vanilla ice cream cone. “My national security adviser tells me that we’re close, we’re close, we’re not done yet,” Biden said, before sauntering off. He spoke during a photo op at an ice cream parlor in Manhattan, while the UN was sounding an alarm that “very little humanitarian aid has entered besieged Gaza this month.”

During the 16 months since then, variants of facile verbiage from top U.S. government officials have repeated endlessly, while normalizing genocide with a steep race to the ethical bottom, so that – in Orwellian terms, much like “war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength” – genocide is not genocide.

Refusal to acknowledge the complicity and impunity is most of all maintained by avoidance and silence. The process makes a terrible truth inadmissible rather than admittable.

All the doublethink and newspeak must detour around the reality that the U.S.-supported Israeli siege of Gaza is genocide, which the international Genocide Convention defines as “acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group” – with such actions as “deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

Israel’s actions in Gaza clearly meet that definition, as Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have unequivocally concluded with exhaustive reports. But under the cloaks of the Israeli and American flags, the official stories insist that the unconscionable should be invisible.

Liberal Zionist groups in the United States are part of the process. Here’s what I wrote in an article for The Nation early this year after examining public statements by the “pro-Israel, pro-peace” group J Street:

“Routinely, while calling for the release of the Israeli hostages, the organization also expressed concern about the deaths and suffering of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. But none of J Street’s 132 news releases between October 7 and the start of the [temporary] ceasefire in late January 2025 called for an end to shipments of the U.S. bombs and weapons that were killing those civilians while enforcing Israel’s policy of using starvation as a weapon of war – a glaring omission for a group that declares itself to be ‘pro-peace.’

It was as if J Street thought that vague humanistic pleas could paper over these gaping cracks in its stance.

“However, J Street felt comfortable taking a firm line on the question of whether Israel was committing genocide in Gaza. Here, it aligned itself completely with the position of the U.S. and Israeli governments. In mid-January 2024, when oral arguments ended at the International Court of Justice in the case brought by South Africa that charged the Israeli government with violating the Genocide Convention in Gaza, a news release declared that ‘J Street rejects the allegation of genocide against the State of Israel.’

Four months later, on May 24, J Street responded quickly when the ICJ ordered Israel to ‘immediately halt its military offensive’ in Rafah. ‘J Street continues to reject the allegation of genocide in this case,’ a news release said.”

Likewise, with rare exceptions, U.S. news media and members of Congress dodge the reality of genocide against Palestinians in Gaza.

Meanwhile, the events in Gaza and the evasions in the United States have been enormously instructive, shattering illusions along the way. Many Americans, especially young people, know much more about their country and its government than they did just two years ago.

What has come to light includes mass murder of certain other human beings as de facto policy and functional ideology.

Norman Solomon is the national director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy. The paperback edition of his latest book, War Made Invisible: How America Hides the Human Toll of Its Military Machine, includes an afterword about the Gaza war.

IPS UN Bureau

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