Environmental crimes: Law enforcement issues

Abstract

An analysis of the statistics of registered environmental crimes indicates a clear disproportion between the real state of affairs in ecology and counteraction to such crimes. One of the reasons for this imbalance may be the difficulty in qualifying and proving the crimes in question. When applying the norms on environmental crimes, it should be borne in mind that the overwhelming majority of them are blanket. Along with the massiveness of environmental legislation, there are also actually criminal law issues that give rise to practical problems. These include determination of the form of guilt, the use of evaluative concepts, the need for qualifications in combination with other crimes, the establishment of a causal relationship. The most important are the following steps in the field of combating environmental crime: 1) when determining the form of guilt, along with the content of the act, the methods of its commission and other signs of the objective side, consider the sanction for their commission; 2) the spread of the practice of establishing specific rates for calculating the amount of damage instead of evaluative concepts to unify judicial practice and bring it to uniformity; 3) improvement of calculation methods and practice of compensation for damage resulting from environmental offenses; and 4) minimization of the practice of constructing truncated corpus delicti or concretizing the concept of "threat" in such structures.