Brussele, 13 December 2021
The Commission will shortly unveil its legislative proposal revising Directive 2008/99/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 19 November 2008 on the protection of the environment through criminal law. This legislative amendment comes at a time when environmental crime is on the rise in the Member States and has become in a few short decades the fourth largest criminal sector in the world, as lucrative as drug trafficking. However, while combating environmental crime in all its forms should be afforded priority at European Union level, only 1% of the cases handled by Eurojust concern environmental offences.
In this framework, 54 NGOs and unions – including No Peace Without Justice – from all around Europe and 32 MEPs from 5 political groups co-signed a letter addressed to the European Commission calling on the institution to take advantage of this revision process to improve existing criminal provisions by creating offences tailored to the climate and environmental emergency and by recognizing the crime of ecocide.
– Read the joint letter addressed to Didier Reynders, European Commissioner on Justice and Virginijus Sinkevicius, European Commissioner on the Environment, Ocean and Fisheries.
