Ecological and Judicial Expertise in Criminal Proceedings Against the Environment in Russia

• Authors: Solodov, Ilia

Abstracts

EN

Environmental expertise plays a special role in the course of the investigation of environmental crimes. Its main task is to recreate the mechanism of the incident, established the causation link, as well as determine the scale the negative impact on the environment and the measures to restore its original state. The author discusses the current practice of the environmental expertise in the Russian Federation. In Russia the experts from the state or private laboratories can be appointed to assist the investigator and the court in performing their tasks. The problem is that there is no commonly accepted expert methodology in a case of environmental offences. While the state experts can be expected to apply the standardised methodology approved by the Russian Centre of Forensic Expertise in Moscow, their colleges from the private sector are free to use any methods they consider as appropriate depending on the circumstances of the case. Unfortunately, in Russia, as well as in Poland, there are no effective control mechanisms to ensure that the methods applied and the data used by the experts are scientifically valid. It means that the obtained results are no always reliable and accurate. Another problem referred to the difficulties of the damage assessment in such cases. The dynamics of the environment, the complicity of the relations between its elements makes it extremely hard to assess the scale of the negative impact, as well as to establish the causation link between the human’s actions or negligence and observed changes.

Keywords

EN

environmental crime; environmental expertise; evidence; expert; forensic methodology

• Publisher: Wyższa Szkoła Policji w Szczytnie
• Journal: Internal Security
• Year: 2019
• Volume: 11(2)
• Pages: 75-83

Dates

published

2020-02-12

Contributors

author

Solodov, Ilia

Identifiers

DOI

10.5604/01.3001.0013.8207