Making polluters pay: how can we stop environmental criminals?
If a hazardous substance is leaking into your tap, you may be an indirect victim of an environmental crime. In this episode of The Road to Green, we meet people in Slovakia and Romania who are working to bring criminals to justice.
In partnership with The European Commission
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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.
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