Fighting environmental crime in Europe
The European Union is currently revising its Directive on environmental crime. As environmental crime has become one of the most lucrative crime sectors, always growing in the past years, this revision process is a crucial opportunity to change the law and finally recognise and therefore punish all environmental crimes, including the crime of ecocide.
Webinar Summary and Presentations
During this webinar, which hosted 161 participants, Frederik Hafen, Environmental Democracy Policy Officer at European Environmental Bureau, presented the challenges of fighting environmental crime in Europe, focusing on the following issues:
- How to define the damage of an environmental crime?
- Who is the victim when environmental crime is being convicted?
- Why are there so little convictions of criminals in this area?
- How environmental crime is actually committed in practice?
- Why current convictions don’t really help solve the problems?
- Who cleans up the mess after the crime has been committed?
Currently, environmental crime worldwide is the fourth largest most lucrative crime with around 260 billion US dollars of annual turnover
How to define the damage of an environmental crime?
The example for this would be illegal water abstraction: the price per litre of water per cubic meter of the damage can be quantified, however, the damage done to the surrounding soil quality is much more difficult to assess.
Who is the victim when environmental crime is being convicted?
Normally, the victim is nature itself but in front of the law the nature is voiceless!
Environmental crimes often don’t affect just one person, it is the health of hundreds, thousands, or millions of people that gets damaged. In addition, there is the question of the future generations: how do you define the victims that haven’t even been born yet, or that are infants at this stage—and the impact that environmental crime will have on them?
Why are there so little convictions of criminals in this area?
The main reason for this is the lack of political will and resources. In addition, at national levels, there’s a lot of expertise lacking at the national levels. Currently, in Europe, only a few countries have dedicated environmental crime prosecution services.
How environmental crime is actually committed in practice?
Most environmental crime in practice is linked to some form of authorization—to a licence, a permit, which can be obtained fraudulently, via corruption, or they are forged documents.
Why current convictions don’t really help solve the problems?
Environmental crimes, especially in Europe, are being committed by big economic actors. Furthermore, the likelihood of being detected, the consequences of the risk and the fines are very low.
Who cleans up the mess after the crime has been committed?
In Europe the aim is to adhere to the “polluter pays principle”. For more information, please visit: eeb.org/make-polluters-pay/
Fighting environmental crime in Europe
Roxane Chaplain, the parliamentary assistant for Marie Toussaint, MEP, presented the current work on the EU Directive, and concrete changes that could happen for the environment.
Some of the main recommendations and objectives within the current revision show that it is necessary to:
- recognise autonomous environmental crimes
- condemn ecocide at the European level
- create a European Green Prosecutor and specialised police forces
Download the presentation “Fighting environmental crime in Europe”
What is the role of Protected Areas in fighting environmental crimes?
Following the presentations, participants took part in the participatory exercise to discuss the role of Protected Areas in this issue.
To get an insight into their full discussion, please take a look at the full recording of the webinar which can also be found here.