On Wednesday, Minister of Justice Inese Lībiņa-Egnere signed the Council of Europe (CoE) Convention on the Criminal Law Protection of the Environment, reaffirming Latvia's commitment to strengthening the fight against environmental crimes and promoting a pan-European approach to the investigation and prosecution of environmental offenses.
The Convention is a comprehensive document of the European Parliament aimed at criminalizing environmental harm and establishing a coordinated European approach to prosecuting serious environmental crimes. It requires countries to criminalize the most serious environmental offenses, ensuring effective punishment for both individuals and legal entities. This includes serious pollution, unauthorized transportation and disposal of waste, damage to protected areas, violations of the protection of plants and animals, and other forms of harm.
The Convention also strengthens cross-border cooperation and legal assistance. Unified European standards will allow countries to exchange information more quickly, coordinate investigations more effectively, and prevent the spread of such crimes more efficiently, especially in areas where there have been differences in legal frameworks in the past.
By signing the Convention, the Minister of Justice emphasized that Latvia has already achieved much in environmental protection, but natural pollution has cross-border impacts, so global challenges require common standards and joint actions.
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