In These New Times

Telecom Paper

5th November, 2012

A court in Zutphen, Netherlands has annulled a permit for a UMTS antenna due to beekeeping activities in the area. The Winterswijk municipality gave KPN the permit to build the tower in November 2010. Five local residents filed an appeal against the permit, and the court found that the city did not motivate its decision well enough to show there would be no negative consequences from the cell site. One of the residents keeps bees around 80m from the proposed site; in the appeal against the site, he pointed to research in Germany and Switzerland on the effects of electromagnetic radiation on bees. The city pointed to other research showing bee deaths related to other factors and said the radiation in this case would be much less than in the German research. However the court found that the city needed to provide more concrete sources of research to sustain its argument and it could not be ruled out that the site would have an effect on the bees.