EA secures funds to help tackle illegal shipments

The EU windfall will be partly used to help tackle waste crime, particularly illegal transfrontier shipments, and strengthening prosecutions.

It comes from the EU’s ‘LIFE’ programme to develop the European Network of Prosecutors for the Environment (ENPE) – an organisation founded in 2012 by representatives from prosecuting bodies in England, France, Belgium, Sweden, Ireland, Italy and Germany.

This round of funding is specifically due to the Agency’s partnership with prosecutors in Ireland, the Netherlands and Sweden, as well as the EU Forum of Judges for the Environment.

As coordinating body, the UK Environment Agency – which currently holds the presidency of the ENPE – will use the money to support work in waste, wildlife and chemical pollution crime across the European Union.

ENPE

It will allow ENPE to embark upon an ‘ambitious’ five year programme of work to strengthen prosecutors’ capacity to tackle environmental crime, in particular illegal international shipments of waste, destruction of wildlife and its habitats and crimes relating to industrial discharges and chemicals.

The waste ‘workstream’ will forge connections between national prosecutors active in tackling waste crime, create a database of European judgments in waste cases, and develop training packages, case studies and best practice guides to aid prosecutors’ day-to-day work.

By collaborating with colleagues in other jurisdictions and sharing information to deliver these materials, the Agency aim to leverage ‘very significant benefits’ beyond the additional EU funding.

Borders

Jonathan Robinson, Environment Agency executive director of legal services – and who is also president of the ENP – said: “I am thrilled that the Environment Agency has secured this European funding. Environmental crime increasingly involves sophisticated and organised criminals, working across borders, and it can cause serious harm to the environment and put communities at risk.

“It is vital that the Environment Agency and other European environmental prosecutors work collaboratively to tackle this problem through bodies such as ENPE, and this funding will help us do that.”

• The Environmental Services Association welcomed the fund and said it hoped the money would complement work that is already being done on a UK level.