Page 77 - Supplemento 2-2016 (ENG)

Tackling Environmental Crime throUgh standardized Methodologies

own objectives. All this should be understood even abroad, and most of all
abroad, so that nobody outside of Italy should think and say that environmen-
tal criminality is a specifically and typically Italian problem, just because in Italy
we have the mafia. Ladies and gentlemen from abroad, please consider that
environmental criminality is something totally different from mafia criminality.
Environmental criminality proceeds from companies that infringe the regula-
tions designed to protect the environment. On the basis of the protection of
these interests, different criminal systems may step in but, ladies and gentlemen
from abroad, that mafia, nowadays, in Italy, does not deal any longer with waste.
It’s quite possible, instead that it may continue to do so in other Countries
where it may have taken roots and where, because it is not well known, they
don’t know how to fight it. Namely, it is possible that the mafia has settled in
your countries and there, is in the service of environmental criminal powers
that are economic and financial, to continue to do what they did in Italy at the
end of the last century. Nowadays, instead, in Italy environmental criminality is
a set, the combined activity of economic, financial and often political interests
aiming to pursue their objectives with no hesitation in sacrificing that funda-
mental right guaranteed by the Constitution that we mentioned in the begin-
ning, which must prevail, according to the explicit provision by section two of
article 41 of the Constitution, over free economic enterprise, which, if exerci-
sed with no restraint, can easily enter the criminal domain as it actually does.

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