ABSTRACT
The Hungarians raised the idea of involving foreign ecological experts in the issue and formally suggested this to the Czechoslovak government on January 12, 1990. Initially, the Hungarians were the most eager to achieve European Community (EC) political involvement and they raised this at the political level, after refusing to respond to several earlier Czechoslovak proposals to include EC environmental experts in a low-key trilateral expert commission. Hungary invokes violation of general rules of international environmental law by Slovakia. The Slovak side would argue that these provisions are not legally binding and in any case are too general as to preclude the Gabcikovo-Nagymaros dam system. The dam project is highly symbolic and potentially an explosive threat to the stability of the region. For the moment, referral of the issue to the International Court and the mediation efforts of the European Union, which contributed to achieving that result, have cooled the dispute down and put it on the back-burner.
