Criminal redress in cases of environmental victimisation: a defence
This paper concerns an increasingly pressing issue – the response of formal justice mechanisms to the impacts of environmental crime on its victims. The harms affecting individuals and communities across the world as a result of environmentally polluting practices are increasingly understood and condemned, but very little of the legal and criminological literature considers the victims of environmental harm directly and none of it has set out to systematically compare different mechanisms of redress from the victims’ perspective or to suggest how such redress might be better facilitated or what form it might take. The present article seeks to remedy this extremely unsatisfactory and potentially re-victimising situation. It also seeks to challenge the present trend among commenters to criticise and deprioritize proposals that suggest that responses to environmental harm should involve the criminal justice system. This paper scrutinises the options for redress open to victims of crime across a number of jurisdictions and offers the first systematic and critical assessment of their suitability for use in environmental cases.