Combatting waste crime

The official policy of the EU puts a strong emphasis on stimulating the use of criminal enforcement and – at the same time – aims at strengthening enforcement systems that rely strongly on administrative enforcement. The Member States, by transposing the Environmental Crime Directive have to attach to the existing prohibitions some criminal sanctions. Very often, they keep a combination of criminal and administrative punishment which should achieve that only the offenders who commit the most severe and harmful violations should be criminally prosecuted, while less serious offences can be dealt with using administrative enforcement.

Many countries such as Germany, Denmark, Austria or the Czech Republic apply comprehensive legislation detailing administrative sanctions for environmental offences, alongside criminal penalties. Even several European countries that predominantly relied on criminal enforcement in the past recently moved towards more administrative enforcement. The overall picture emerging from these developments is a move towards combined criminal-administrative enforcement systems. This is in line with several policy papers, which argue that, in practice, exclusive reliance on criminal enforcement is not the most cost-effective path for environmental regulation enforcement. The hypothesised effect of moving to a combined enforcement system can be summarised as follows: the probability that an offence is sanctioned increases, thus the expected costs of non-compliance increase for potential offenders and this leads to a lower number of environmental offences. The major difference between the sanctioning systems is that administrative sanctions are more comfortable to impose (and therefore assumed to be cheaper) than criminal penalties, due to complicated criminal procedure and the cost-effectiveness of criminal sanctions. In practice, the largest group of small offenders may be treated in a rather co-operative way, using the possibility of administrative warnings.