| dc.description.abstract | Despite much development of the soft as well as hard laws in the field
of international environmental governance, the response to environmental
crimes has remained focused on non-criminal solutions. At the domestic
level, laws addressing environmental crimes are traditionally seen as
extension of public and administrative laws protecting the environment,
rather than as a fully developed separate branch of criminal law. Various
activities resulting in environmental degradation including the threat to
global warming creates a sense of urgency, and also poses questions about
the proper scope of international offences against the environment. Few
international environmental instruments recognized environmental
degradation as an offence such as illegal trade in wildlife, ozone depleting
substances, dumping and illegal transport of various kinds of hazardous
waste, illegal fishing, illegal logging and the associated trade in stolen
timber. Recently there is a growing concern all over the world, regarding
the fast growing criminal activities severely affecting the environment and
the biodiversity. It poses a serious challenge to the international
environmental governance which is already vulnerable mostly being soft
law. The paper begins by looking at the conceptual limitations on the
emergence of a mature international criminal law of the environment. It
further discusses the issue by discussing the status of international
environmental crime based on secondary data resource, and concludes by
describing the future of the development of international criminal law to
protect the environment. | en_US |
