00:00Environmental crime is the third largest organized crime worldwide.
00:11It costs hundreds of billions of euros every year and we wonder who will foot the bill.
00:17The European Union recently adopted a new directive on environmental crime.
00:21It extends the list of criminal offenses and aims to step up the fight against criminals.
00:26Today we're in Slovakia and we're going to show you an example. Here we go.
00:41Here's an environmental crime scene. An hour's drive from Bratislava, this landfill with a rather suggestive name has caused a stir in the country.
00:49So this is what we call the Wolf's Mountain?
00:52Yes, this is the area of landfill. Everything was legal until the perpetrator started to do the illegal activity.
01:01This activity was the burial of hazardous waste, which the company was paid a lot of money to treat.
01:07What remains today are craters filled with refinery residues.
01:11The intention was to give it here, wait for a few weeks and then cover by other inner waste as you can see here.
01:19So no chance for us to find this place again.
01:25But that wasn't counting a police operation in 2015. An analysis showed that the entire landfill was already contaminated.
01:31These violations of the European Waste Framework Directive meant that the site should have been closed.
01:38The European Commission launched an infringement procedure against Slovakia.
01:42How much will it cost to clean up all this?
01:45We are speaking about tens of millions of euros. All illegal hazardous waste will have to be removed and all this landfill will be closed.
01:55So it's a good end of the story.
01:58And good for the animals as well. Good for the deers.
02:04This case would not have been solved without the involvement of civil society.
02:08The neighbouring town was worried about leaks into the nature.
02:10Bratislav Strakansky took risks to provide the police with evidence.
02:15Nice to meet you. I'm seeing you.
02:28Why were you doing this inside you? What was pushing you?
02:32The building was closed. It was just a long time ago.
02:43The case is taken on a national dimension thanks in parts to Greenpeace.
02:48As early as 2015, the Slovak branch of the NGO warned of the presence of pollutants in the soil and water
02:54and filed a complaint with the public prosecutor.
02:56There is a huge power in the society. Not only bringing attention to environmental crimes, but also holding those responsible and ensuring that they are held accountable.
03:08We try to make sure that the price for the pollution and for the impacts doesn't fall on people's shoulders.
03:12It's the polluter pays principle. But how do you apply it when the perpetrators use complex schemes and then disappear?
03:22This is the difficult task of the environmental police. Here we meet Lieutenant Colonel Koperek.
03:28Here you can see some evidence.
03:30He is a member of Envy Crime.net, a network of police and prosecutors who want to harmonize the fight against those who destroy nature.
03:38We always say that law without law enforcement is only a recommendation.
03:44Our perpetrators, they are in many cases CEO of legal companies and so on.
03:49They believe or think that they will not be detected.
03:54When we will work together at the level of the European Union and we all will be specialised,
04:00the motivation will decrease significantly and also the impact of the environment will decrease.
04:10This is one of the aims of the new Environmental Crime Directive.
04:13It also extends the list of acts that constitute a criminal offence from 9 to 20, including illegal timber trade.
04:22We're off to Romania, home to two thirds of the continent's primary forests.
04:27Here, they are a matter of national security.
04:31Millions of cubic metres of wood disappear illegally every year and technology is sometimes called in to help.
04:37Artificial intelligence systems coupled with satellite imagery allow us to monitor the decline of primary forests.
04:44In 2016, it automatically scans the forest and it picks up disturbances.
04:49Obviously, you don't know for sure that it's human.
04:52It could be a natural event, but it will for sure give you an alert that the forest has been disturbed there.
04:57For our study, we realised that in a short period of time, in the last three years,
05:00there's been something like almost 5,000 hectares of primary forest has been degraded just in Fogadash Mountains alone.
05:09Protecting primary forests is one of the objectives of the European Forest Strategy.
05:13Gabriel Porn is an activist who hunts down irregularities in the forestry industry.
05:18These cuts happen in the Nature 2000 area.
05:21The law requires an impact study to be carried out, but he says it was not done properly.
05:25The problem is that they have do paper forgery and they have put in the papers that the forest is 120 years old,
05:35which is the harvesting age legally, just to justify this road to come and cut it.
05:41The problem, studies are made by the same people who manage, cut and sell the forest.
05:46Under pressure from civil society, Romania has just adopted a new forestry code that involves everyone that intends the traceability.
05:59All forestry operations must be registered on a national database.
06:05An official app enables everyone to check the legality of shipments.
06:09You have all dates.
06:12It was at 17h13, three days ago.
06:16There are even photos.
06:18And if you compare them with the photos I took, it's the same thing.
06:21It works.
06:28Welcome to Bucarest.
06:31It's huge.
06:33We have a meeting right here with the judicial power.
06:37Hello.
06:39Welcome to our home.
06:41Thank you very much.
06:43Prosecutor Mihaila is in charge of the Environmental Crimes Bureau.
06:47He too uses this system.
06:50We can gather evidence to link with other things that are important in our investigation.
06:57Except that he has access to the entire database to conduct his investigations,
07:01and there are sometimes irregularities.
07:04Sometimes it's a tendency to put less in the system, to have more on the field.
07:11Like a backup to steal it.
07:15But out of 40,000 forestry cases, too few resulted in sanctions last year.
07:21His bureau is working to boost the court's efficiency.
07:23We can deliver methodology, guidance, the part with the people that are informed from the foresters,
07:31the companies that are logging the forest, the thefts or some kind of illegal offences.
07:37Our colleagues must go to this guidance.
07:40So it's a source of inspiration.
07:42So no longer should be a prosecutor that can say, I didn't know what to do.
07:46The mechanisms are getting in place, and we all have a role to play.
07:53That's all for this time. See you soon.
Comments