Giorgi Matiashvili - Environmental crimes in a transnational context. Topical issues of international environmental disputes as a risk of threat to the world legal order

2) Special ecological crimes that encroach on individual components or components of nature (air, water and so on). These include:

– Water pollution;

– Air pollution;

– Pollution of the marine environment,

– Violation of the legislation on the continental shelf of the country and on the exclusive economic zone of the country;

– Damage to the earth;

– Violation of the rules for the protection and use of subsoil;

– Illegal harvesting of aquatic animals and plants;

– Violation of the rules for the protection of fish stocks;

– Illegal hunting;

– Destruction of populations of organisms specified in the Red List;

– Illegal chopping of wood;

– Destruction or damage to forests;

– Violation of the regime of specially protected natural areas and natural objects;

The subject of these crimes is the ambient environment itself and its most significant components: land, subsoil, forests and plant kingdom in general, wildlife, water, atmospheric air, continental shelf, marine environment, specially protected natural areas and objects.

The specificity of the formulation of environmental criminal law prohibitions is the high level of their blankness. In this regard, in order to specify the content of a particular criminal law norm on ecological crimes, it is necessary to refer to many legislative and other normative acts.

The concretization of some criminal law prohibitions in the countries is carried out with the attraction of international treaties in the field of ecology (for example, in case of pollution of the marine environment – the Convention on the Prevention of Marine Pollution by Dumping of Wastes and Other Matter of 1972).

Convention on the Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law, ETS No. 172 (Strasbourg, 4 November 1998);

In December 2019, the International Criminal Court in the Hague received an application from the Ambassador of Vanuatu in the European Union (EU) / proposing to make the destruction of nature a criminal offence.

At the beginning of the 21st century, in the structure of political and environmental risks, taking into account global trends- special attention should be paid to such a specific phenomenon, such as ecological terrorism, depicting a huge variety of forms, means and methods of commitment, as well as subjects and objects. Its forms include ecocide, environmental colonialism and others.

Eco-terrorism – it is an act of violence on dangerous objects in the context of ecology. From this point of view, hazardous facilities include all types of power station plants, production of the nuclear fuel cycle and nuclear ammunitions, chemical, petrochemical and oil refining, metallurgical, biotechnical enterprises, storage facilities for their raw materials and products;

oil and gas and ammonia pipelines, as well as military facilities, containing radioactive and toxic substances, their storage facilities and waste deposits.

The main part of such facilities is located in the port-industrial zones of port cities, in large cities and densely populated areas, creating a constant threat of environmental disasters. Eco-terrorism is the intimidation of people through the impact on the ambient environment. Therefore, it is necessary to solve the issue of political and legal control over eco-terrorism.

In modern scientific and publicistic literature, the term eco-terrorism itself (ecoterrorism, ecotage = ecology + sabotage) has two different meanings and is understood as at least two, in our opinion, extremely different phenomena:

– Radical actions of “Greens” and the actions of groups and individuals, fighting for the rights of animals and coming out for the liberation of animals, as well as any “greens” (environmentalists) aimed at deliberately polluting the natural environment, with the aim of causing the enemy an ecological damage and subsequent blackmail in this direction. Apparently, it is the latter interpretation that is more consistent with the content of the concept of “Eco-terrorism”. This variety of terrorism is even more dangerous, than other terrorist crimes, since violent actions are applied to citizens or their property indirectly, through the natural environment, the existence in which will be difficult or impossible for all living things in the future. Ecological terrorism leads, as a rule, to irreversible and difficult to eliminate consequences, which are often of a global nature. Suffice it to recall, that while radioactive contamination, the ambient environment may remain improper for life for many thousands of years.

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