The Green World movement challenged in court the removal of 20 forest plots from the TRNC forest reserve

The Green World movement (Yeşil Barış Hareketi) has petitioned the High Court of the TRNC, demanding the annulment of a Council of Ministers decision under which 20 plots with a total area of 142,567 square metres — approximately 106.5 dönüms — were removed from the forest reserve.

The activists made the announcement outside the High Court registry building. The movement’s Secretary-General Feriha Tel addressed journalists together with Chairman Doğan Şahır and movement members İzlem Nizam, Emre Efendi and Ahmet İyigün. According to Tel, the reasoning behind the Council of Ministers’ decision had not been publicly disclosed, so the movement, with the support of the Chamber of Forest Engineers, referred the case to court.

“Not a single span of forest in this country is ownerless,” the movement said in a statement. The activists promised to monitor the proceedings and stated that such decisions must be examined from the perspective of the public interest and their impact on the environment.

This is already the second such dispute. The movement had previously reported that, under the government of Ünal Üstel, a Council of Ministers decision removed 21 plots with a total area of approximately 112 dönüms from the forest reserve. The land was located in the areas of Alsancak, Edremit, Beylerbeyi, Çatalköy and Tatlısu.

At the time, the movement described these decisions as opening forest areas for development in pursuit of profit and announced the start of legal proceedings to have them annulled.