Environmental crimes: Law enforcement issues (original) (raw)
Related papers
Criminological Outlook of Overcoming Disproportionate Punishment in Environmental Crimes
International Journal of Criminology and Sociology, 2021
Criminal determination in a number of environmental offenses still raises excessive criminal threats. The weight of a criminal for offense committed due to negligence is even more severe than the weight of the criminal for deliberate offense which causes death. Criminal weights can also not be compared in weight to offenses that have the same level of seriousness. In the Law reviewed, the criminal threat in some formal offenses is more severe than in material offenses so that it violates the principle of proportionality. Excessive crimes can be overcome through ranking offenses based on their seriousness which refers to the four models of criminalization based on environmental losses. The serious environmental pollution model places the most serious offense ranking, followed by the concrete harm model, then the concrete endangerment, and finally the abstract endangerment. After the ranking of environmental offenses is compiled, the criminal weight is determined. Spacing of penalties between the offense groups to another also needs to be determined.
Challenges in regulating environmental crimes
2017
Environmental crimes can be broadly defined as illegal acts that directly harm the environment. Often perceived as victimless and incidental crimes, environmental crimes frequently rank low on the law enforcement priority list, and are commonly punished with administrative sanctions which are themselves often unclear and minor. The paper is pointing to the relevance of the Directive 2009/99/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 November 2008 on the protection of the environment through criminal law (ECD) which itself is not as an instrument of criminal law, as the provision on environmental liability can help prevent environmental crime by making perpetrators liable for consequences of their action and clean-up measures. The lack of legal certainty may also be a weakness in ECD which defines what constitutes an environmental crime by reference to a behaviour being unlawful under other directives. Also, it implies that the definition of environmental crime depends up...
Protecting Environment through Criminal Sanction Aggravation
Journal of Indonesian Legal Studies
This paper aims to explores the provision of aggravating criminal sanction that protects environment in environmental legislation. By focusing on the four laws as its primary data source, this study employed doctrinal legal research. The results showed that the weight accorded to criminal sanctions in environmental legislation, has varied. The PPLH Law provides for the amplification of criminal threats directed at corporations by adding 1/3 (one-third) of the criminal sentence. Only companies are subject to the penalty aggravation provisions of the Mining Law, and they are only imposed with one-third of the maximum criminal provision of fines. In the PPPH Law, the imposition of criminal threats weight is simply related to the quantity component. If the culprit is a corporation or official, the criminal sanction aggravation is increased by one-third. In Plantation Law, if the offender is a corporate or a government official, then the criminal punishment is intensified. The environmen...
Social, Economic and Political Factors of Environmental Crime
The VIII International Scientific Conference Archibald Reiss Days, 2018
Environmental crime includes a variety of criminal offences directed towards the environment, i.e. its integral parts such as: air, water, soil, flora and fauna. In the past couple of decades, the number of criminal offences against the environment has been increasing, causing serious concern on a global level, especially if committed in organised and/or transnational form. The consequences of environmental crime are serious and affect both the environment and humankind, particularly poor local communities whose incomes depend on limited natural resources. There are several social, economic and political factors of environmental crime that are closely interrelated with one another. However, the experiences of different countries presented in an array of reports published by prominent international and local organisations and institutions as well as in a number of academic papers suggest that some of these factors can be considered the most influential. These comprise: the attempts of financially superior multi-national corporations to enlarge their profit by avoiding to invest money in the protection of the environment from their industrial activities, lack of financial resources and institutional capacities for efficient monitoring of activities that pollute the environment, lack of political will to integrate environmental protection issues into sectoral public policies, insufficient cooperation among relevant subjects on both local and international level for the purpose of prevention, discovering and sanctioning the perpetrators of these criminal offences, low level of environmental awareness, etc. Becoming familiar with key factors that enhance the commission of environmental criminal offences can play an important role in the prevention of this type of crime through the minimisation or, when possible, complete elimination of its causes. Therefore, the author of this paper analyses key social, political and economic factors of environmental crime, suggesting the ways to influence these factors in order to contribute to its efficient and prompt prevention.
Crime and Justice: A Review of Research, 2004
Enhanced protection of the physical environment was the focus of legislative and regulatory initiatives in many nations in the closing decades of the twentieth century. The strength of the environmental movement and the attention paid to environmental crime are belied by the paucity of systematic data on its extent and distribution, its perpetrators, and responses to it. Organizational offenders have received by far the greatest attention from investigators, and case studies compose a substantial part of the research literature. Rational-choice approaches predominate. Most states give regulatory agencies primary responsibility for responding to environmental illegalities and crime. They generally do not operate vigorously, and penalties imposed are not severe. Criminal prosecution of environmental offenders occurs infrequently. Responsive regulation is touted as an effective response to traditional problems of control and regulation, but it remains a promissory note. The increasing globalization of economic relationships makes more difficult and further challenges regulatory oversight of increasingly transnational corporations.
Applying Criminal Penalties and Consequences in Enforcing Environmental Protection Compliance
Our present Environmental Laws adopting criminal sanctions as means of environmental protection compliance focus on punishing the lack of a permit or the violation of permit or other regulatory requirements and conditions set out by the Environmental protection agencies. The author argues that if the role of the criminal law is restricted to defining the conditions of an administrative permit, and the authorities at the same time determine the conditions of criminal liability, this may point to the fact that a more direct environmental protection by the criminal law, such as exists for traditional crimes, is more difficult to reach in achieving an environmental end. The paper highlights the serious weaknesses in this approach. To this end, the premise of the paper therefore is that we should have graduated approach to environmental crimes that are less dependent on administrative law, especially where a prohibited act has serious consequence of creating death, serious injury, or a significant risk of death or serious injury. When this is the case the author argued that it can lead to criminal liability irrespective of a violation of administrative obligations, making serious environmental abuse to be treated in the same as violators of traditional crimes. Thus, the main focus of this paper is how do we fit in the typology of environmental crimes to elicit environmental protection compliance?
Humans have been committing crimes against both the human and natural environments in various forms and intensities since the beginning of times. Accentuated since the industrial revolution, such crimes have taken a new dimension to the point of representing a risk to the future of both human society and natural systems. Recognised as to their extraordinary extent and volume, environmental/ecological crimes have been debated and discussed on numerous platforms, but to this day, developments in environmental/ecological crimes appear to have concentrated on identifying perpetrators and quantifying such crimes in monetary terms, but hardly in terms of biological losses or ecosystem degradation. At this stage in the development of international environmental law, or rather its stagnation, questions are being asked by scholars as to whether it is not time to move away from the sinuous route of criminalising environmental harms through existing criminological perceptions, and take the direct route of qualifying it as a crime of Ecocide, on the same level that the crime of Genocide has been recognised in international criminal law.