Abstract
This book gives an insight into the environmental legal system of member states of the European Union, focusing on the role of criminal law. It provides the reader with an introduction to these environmental legal systems giving attention to the main environmental statutes, furnishing references to additional literature and documenting the most important provisions in three different languages (i.e., English, German or French and/or each member state's official language).
The book originates from different sources. In the course of his involvement in the drafting process of the Council of Europe Convention for the Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law, Günter Heine investigated the legal systems of a large number of countries. Michael Faure drafted a study on request of the Dutch Ministry of Justice on the basic notions of environmental criminal law enforcement in the European member states. Finally, both studies, supplemented by results of the project of the Max Planck Institute for Foreign and International Criminal Law "Environmental Criminal Law - National and Transnational", have been brought together in this volume.
Chapter 1 outlines general features of environmental criminal law, chapter 2 presents the documentation of environmental criminal law in 15 member states with an introduction to each country, followed by concluding remarks (chap-ter 3). Three appendices contain the Council of Europe Convention with a comment, the resolutions of the XVth International Congress of Penal Law and an overview of the instruments of international cooperation in the field of criminal law.
The countries covered by this study are:
Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom.
