Page 191 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)

Tackling Environmental Crime throUgh standardized Methodologies

Leif Gorts
Head of Eurojust Project Team of Environmental Crime

Reflexions on international cooperation against serious environmental
criminality

Like all previous speakers, I would like to thank and congratulate the orga-
nisers for this very good and interesting conference, which I am honoured to
attend. I am Leif Gorts and I have worked many years as a chief prosecutor in
Stockholm and today I work for Eurojust in The Hague. It is an EU organisa-
tion and many of you have probably heard the name but perhaps not all of you
know exactly what we do. We are an organisation with prosecutors or magistra-
tes from all over the European Union, mandated to be advisors and facilitators
to our colleagues in the member states, when fighting in particular organised
cross-border ongoing crime, with environmental crime quite often being preci-
sely that.

I am here today in my capacity as contact point for environmental crime
so, in that sense, representing my organisation and to tell you a little bit about
what we can do in the context of environmental crime. Because we are an ope-
rational organisation, we occasionally go to conferences like today, but we
mainly work on cases that are delivered to us or cases where the prosecutors or
magistrates in the member states have turned to us asking for assistance in
order to go deep in the cooperation with other countries. So what we primarily
do is in the area of judicial leadership over investigations and our expertise lies
in the field of the rather formal international cooperation that we have in order
to obtain the evidence - the evidence we need to convince a court that the per-
sons prosecuted by the relevant prosecutor have indeed committed this crime.

I wish to cover three main questions: what problems do we have today?
What are the legal instruments available? Do we have a proper methodology?

Today, we have grand problems and, as my fellow speakers have highli-
ghted, we don’t have enough prosecutions taking place in Europe. We can cer-
tainly do better. From a Eurojust point of view, I know that Italy is an exception
in this context, along with the Netherlands, whereas the majority of countries,

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