International Environmental Crime: A growing concern of International Environmental Governance

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.