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ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION IN ITALIAN CRIMINAL LAW. LIABILITIES OF INDIVIDUALS AND ORGANISATIONS
Abstract
It seems that over the years in the Italian legal system, the legislator has never provided a clear legal concept of the environment that can be taken as a safe point of reference. Indeed, the environment is defined differently in different laws - sometimes indirectly or per relationem - and this creates considerable difficulty of interpretation. Particularly since the mid-seventies in Italy there has been a significant increase in legislation protecting the essential elements of the biosphere (water, air and soil) that has affected various branches of the system including criminal law, to which the legislator has assigned an increasingly central role. A crucial point when it comes to environmental criminal law is to define the legal asset to be protected. There are two essential but conflicting perspectives: the first can be identified as 'ecocentrism' or 'biocentrism', and advocates the protection of the environmental asset for its own sake; the second is called 'anthropocentrism', and favours the relationship between the environment and man, in which the environment is protected because it is functional to man, with the latter becoming its centre. The relatively recent introduction into the Criminal Code of certain environmental crimes requires - today more than ever - that the concept of the environment as the subject of the protection be described. This is because terms are often used when describing it that are very imprecise. For some years now, as well as the liability of a natural person for crimes committed, there has also existed the liability of legal persons (first and foremost of companies) and this is because, quite rightly, the legislator cannot ignore the fact that statistically many environmental crimes are committed in the interest of businesses.
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References12
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