Criminal-environmental policy of Ukraine: compensation for damage caused by crimes against the environment

Abstract

Purpose. To analyze issues of criminal ecological policy of Ukraine, which is one of the ways for human rights protection for individuals who have been harmed as a consequence of committing crimes against the environment; to define the current status of the problem in Ukraine, foreign experience and provide scientifically grounded propositions for current legislation improvement. Methodology. General and special methods were applied during the investigation: method of formal logical analysis, compara tive method, structural approach, sociological, statistical and method of comparative law. findings. According to the research, it was established that human rights protection for individuals who have been harmed as a consequence of crimes against environmental safety, requires changes in the legal regulation and in practice of law enforcement in three directions. First, there is a possibility for an individual to be affected only by the infliction of moral damage in environmental crimes. Second, the use of the regulation in The Criminal Procedural Code of Ukraine, according to which the victim cannot be a person who has been inflicted nonpecuniary damage as a legal representative or a certain part of society, has to be treated as erroneous. Third, replacing the notion and concept of "close relatives" and "family members" with "successors" will help to op timize the objectives of criminal proceedings. originality. As a result, there have been developed directions of changes in legal regulation and in practice of application of legislation that standardizes human rights protection for individuals who have been damaged in crimes against environmental safety. Also, the criminal procedural legislation's ineffectiveness is established and possible ways of optimizing its provisions are suggested. Practical value. The practical significance of the results is that they can be used in pretrial investigations and criminal proceed ings on environmental security offenses, by subjects of legislative initiative, scientists, and higher education applicants.

Using US Natural Resource Damage Assessment to understand the environmental consequences of the war in Ukraine

“…The utility of the US NRDA approach, however, is not diminished by the current limitations defining ecocide in international courts. In fact, Baliuk et al (2020) and Ladychenko et al (2019) argue that Ukraine has much of the legal foundation necessary to prosecute environmental crimes and award compensation for damages. An environmental damage assessment process conducted with technical rigor comparable to the US NRDA paradigm could provide Ukraine with a scientifically defensible basis for holding perpetrators accountable for the purposeful destruction of the environment.…”