The last Spanish Criminal Code Reform on environmental crimes: legal construction and case studies

Abstract

The Spanish Criminal Code has been submitted for numerous changes along its lifetime, nevertheless the latest reform made by the Constitutional Law 1/2015 has affected a huge amount of sections within it. Although the part focused on environmental crimes is not as large as others, six from its eight articles have experienced considerable alterations. Thereby we can find regarding to ecological crime, that the Criminal Code now request liability not just to those who might seriously damage natural systems but also those who cause or might cause substantial harms to air, ground or water quality or to animals or plants. And there is also an important update on these crimes as is that the criminal behaviours that may cause this damages and harms could be considered in itself or jointly with other ones. The punishment for these crimes is not just for physical people but also for legal ones. As there are some open-ended terms in the legal definition of the crime such as “substantial harms”, “seriously damage”, “not negligible amount of” it is interesting to find out how the case law is solving these “definition problems” and what are the requirements or the evidences they are demanding in order to assess these elements. So as to do this, some judgements from different Spanish Courts are analysed to highlight if there is any difference between them when reading these sections.