On March 30th, 1998 the Brazilian Law on Environmental Crimes came into force, which sets forth the penal and administrative crimes resulting from conduct or activities harmful to the environment. By establishing legal means to assure an ecologically balanced environment, healthy life quality and the integrity of air, water bodies, forests and biodiversity, this law fixes civil, administrative and criminal penalties not only for private individuals, but also for corporations and business. It includes modern methods where jail sentences are replaced by restraining orders that restrict the defendant’s possibility of continuing to abuse the environment. The new law corrects glaring ambiguities which previous legislation covered in a scattered and disjointed manner.
Great relevance is also given to the corporation’s penal responsabilities.
From now they shall be made responsible for environmental infraction, be
it commited through the legal, contractual or collegiated representative’s
decisions to their own interes or benefit, or who, by any means, could
have contributed to practice of crime at the measure and proportion of
their own culpability. This follows a trend already existing in the United
States of America, Canada, France, New Zealand and other nations. This
law punishes, as well, managers, administrators, members of a council and/or
technical organism, auditors, executives, corporation’s agents or proxies,
who knowing about criminous conduct of others, fail to impede their practice
when everything possible should be done to avoid it.
It is also provided the compulsory extinction of a corporation which
has been formed or utilized aiming at facilitating or enshouding an environmental
crime; in this case, its patrimony shall be transfered to the National
Penitentiary Fund; the reversibility of punishment based on the environmental
claim, putting into evidence the environment against the former punishment
of loss of liberty; the conceipt of prevention to environmental crime with
the introduction of " crime of dangerous" when understood as conduct or
activity threating to the environment.
The international cooperation for the environment’s protection is
highlighted in the law, inasmuch as the national sovereignty, the public
order and good costumes are maintained unimpaired. Thus, the Brazilian
Government shall, whenever request, render the necessary cooperation to
other countries, without any onus whatsoever, for the provision of proof,
inspection of the objects and places, informartion about individuals and
their belongings, temporary presence of arrested individuals whose declarations
could be clarifying to the cause’s decision, as wrll as other forms of
assistance permissible by the legislation in vigor or by means of treaties
in which Brazil participates.
Into this new law were included crimes related to urban patrimonium,
such as historic buildings and monuments, that is, their graphitics and
vandalism.
The Brazilian Ministry for Environment and Brazilian Instutute of
the Environment ( IBAMA ) together are promoting a consultation process
with different actors of the society to discuss the best regulation forms
and their implementation.
Only the administrative infractions must still be elaborated into legal regulations which are to be published by May 15. These regulations will establish the fines’ value for each infraction type, ranging from a minimum of R$ 50,00 ( fifty reais) to a maximum of R$50,000,000.00 ( fifty million reais). Before this law came into force, the maximum infraction fine before this law was R$ 5,000.00.
This law for Nature’s protection contextualizes the new modalities of environmental crime, as to what concerns the technological advance and the globalization of the world economy and surely is a powerful tool for the environmental institutions, courts and citizenship. It is up to the brazilian citizens to put it to work, to implement it.