The environment minister was wrong when she decided to allow 20 hectares of woodland to be cut down to improve safety at the Gellenkirchen airbase in Germany, the Council of State ruled on Wednesday.

Although the local Onderbanken council lodged an appeal against the decision, the defence ministry went ahead and cut down six hectares of the Schinveld woodland in 2006. Hundreds of locals and activists tried to stop them and had to be removed from the wood.
The then-environment minister Sybilla Dekker sanctioned the clearance under a so-called Nimby decision (not in my backyard). A Nimby procedure gives a minister the power to over-rule a local authority decision.
Wednesday’s judgement says that the minister was not authorised to use the Nimby procedure for more than half of the woodland because it had not been shown that ‘cutting down the trees in this area was necessary at short notice’.
Onderbanken councillor Hans Ubachs told ANP the judgement showed that government could not ride rough-shod over local councils. ‘The Netherlands isn’t a banana republic after all,’ he said.