The Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law: Preliminary Remarks

Summary

ENVIRONMENT AS A “WORTHY” AND “NEEDY” GOOD FOR CRIMINAL PROTECTION

The reports presented during the 6th Annual Conference of the European Environmental Law Forum in the sessions dedicated to the role of criminal law in the protection of the environment (in part, collected in this volume) demonstrate, first of all, that the need to also protect the environment with the instrument of criminal law is clearly affirmed at international level with consequent impact on national criminal systems. This appears with particular evidence in the European legal area, where the recognition of the environment as good characterised by “worthiness of punishment” and “need for punishment” has matured thanks first to a jurisprudential and then to a legislative process, that culminated in the Directive 2008/99/EC on the protection of the environment through criminal law.

The reports of Miriam Ruiz Arias (“Enterprises’ Environmental Criminal Liability and Compliance Programmes in Spain”), María del Mar Martín Aragón (“The Last Spanish Criminal Code Reform on Environmental Crimes: Legal Construction and Case Studies”) and María-Ángeles Fuentes-Loureiro (“The Influence of Directive 2008/99/CE on Spanish Regulation”) were devoted to the implementation of this Directive in the Spanish legal system. At this conference, Edoardo Mazzanti (“Environment, ECHR and EU Criminal Law. A Possible Interplay”) also underlined the importance of analysing the issue of criminal protection of the environment in the light of the international exchange that takes place between two legal frameworks, firstly of the European Union (now focused in this field on Directive 2008/99/EC) and secondly that revolving around the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The grounds of some judgments of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) and of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) indicate the presence of a real “dialogue between the Courts” about the recognition of the environment as an important good for criminal law and about how to organise such protection.