MOSCOW, April 4 - RAPSI. The Supreme Court board on administrative cases has rejected a complaint over the Greenery Law which allows parks and gardens to be cleared for development, RAPSI reported from the courtroom on Wednesday.

The ruling upholds the Moscow City Court's decision of October 23.

The plaintiffs state that this act of city legislature has allowed parks and gardens in Moscow to be cleared for building schools and kindergartens. Furthermore, they claim it allows land on which garages and car parks stand, or once stood, to be excluded from the list of specially protected nature areas without environmental appraisal or compensation. The public activists who lodged the complaint believe that the Green Law contradicts federal laws which ban any actions damaging to the city's green areas.

Local residents are contesting the Greenery Law, as well as the government resolution which approved this law and the section of Moscow's Urban Development Code which was amended after the law took effect. All these acts allow trees in Moscow parks to be cut down to make way for construction and lift the protected status from areas of nature used, or once used, by garages.

Meanwhile, representatives of the city legislature and city hall insist that parks need to be cleared to build more schools, and that the protected status of the land used by garages infringes on their owners' rights.