La nuova direttiva europea sulla tutela penale dell'ambiente: ragioni della riforma e struttura offensiva delle fattispecie previste

Abstract

Directive 2024/1203 on the protection of the Environment through Criminal Law constitutes a turning point in the evolutionary process of the European Union’s criminal law powers. It inaugurates the use of a detailed and all-encompassing harmonisation model, which regulates in detail all criminal profiles of the subject matter and goes so far as to provide for approximation constraints of the disciplines of general institutions, such as the statute of limitations. On the offensive structure of eco-crimes, however, the main novelties concern: 1) the extension of environmental protection also to cases placed to protect public health (product damage/hazard) or the climate; 2) the definition by means of indicators of the threshold of offence required to activate criminal intervention and of the non-negligible quantity (of waste or animal and plant species trafficked); 3) the provision that basic-offences take the form of aggravated/qualified criminal offences, where they cause environmental damage of enormous magnitude (so-called ‘ecocide’).