THE CONCEPT, ESSENCE AND MODERN PROSPECTS OF ENVIRONMENTAL CRIME PREVENTION IN THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION

This research is highly relevant because environmental crimes (eco-crimes) greatly harm public relations in economic, political, social and cultural spheres of the lives of individuals, society and the state and cause colossal material damage to physical persons, juridical persons and the state. The goal of this article is to define the concept and essence, as well as to provide the criminological description of environmental crimes, which is essential for identifying contemporary prospects of its prevention. The authors describe the concept of this kind of crime in the broad and in the narrow sense. In the broad sense, environmental crime is understood as an aggregate of crimes where the object of infringement is any public relations in the sphere of protecting environmental order and ensuring environmental safety. In the narrow sense, environmental crime is understood as an aggregate of crimes committed during a certain period of time on a specific territory, manifested by a quantity and quality of homogeneous publicly dangerous, illegal, guilty and criminally punishable acts (actions and inactions), where the object of crime is public relations of protecting environmental order and ensuring environmental safety. The research singles out such attributes of environmental crime as public danger, social causation, sustainability, systemic character, structural properties; the authors examine its highly latent, organized, professional and trans-border varieties separately. They present measures to prevent environmental crimes aimed, among other things, at eliminating contradictions between environmental and criminal legislation; incorporating in law requirements to conduct environmental expertise of the planned business activities; developing a system of state and international standards of Russia in the sphere of environmental protection that reduce anthropogenic impact on the environment; developing and activating the court mechanisms of resolving contradictions between the interests of the population, businesses and the state in the sphere of environmental protection; strengthening the system of prosecutor's supervision and implementation of prosecutor's intervention in the sphere of environmental protection, etc.