Speakers
Description
With a population of almost 8 billion, the global impact of human civilization on the environment has never been higher. Societal changes over recent decades have significantly transformed both the human environment and the relationship humans maintain with it. Scholars are notably depicting two unprecedented transformations in modern societies. The first is the dominance of the “global economic system” based on the “concept of growth” which in turn has led to the second, namely, the internationalization of environmental issues (including their destruction). These two patterns create a high level of complexity when it comes to regulating use of the environment. In the economic system, the “nature of public good” and “its characteristics of non-excludability and non-rivalry” prevent self-regulation by means of private law on the market and “produces an inefficient allocation of resources”. Public policies and laws are therefore necessary to correct the allocation of environmental resources. The second trend (the globalisation of environmental issues) further challenges the public attempts to protect the environment with legislation. Lack of information and expertise, national interests, prisoner's dilemma and regulatory competition between sovereign States feature among the main obstacles to the development of international environmental policies and laws. Nonetheless, political and legal steps have been taken by the international community. Currently, more than “3,000 multilateral and bilateral environmental agreements” have been implemented at the international level to manage shared environmental resources, preserve natural habitats, and reduce environmental harm. International Environmental Law has even recognised the most detrimental behaviours to the environment as criminal activities. In Europe for instance, the Directive 2008/99/EC requires Member States to criminalise certain types of environmentally damaging or endangering behaviour. However, even if the international corpus of text is growing, academics and practitioners warn of their non-compliance. The problem in relation to International Environmental Law is that it has progressively shifted from the absence of bidding rules (which in itself continues to be problematic) to the absence of enforcement of the rules at the field level. At this level, the absence of accessible and reliable data to constitute evidence remains a major obstacle to ensure compliance. The United Nations for instance very recently highlighted that many national environmental courts “may not be able to monitor whether their orders are implemented”. Eurojust also broadly considered that environmental investigative proceedings are faced with a global problem of efficiency. The institution pointed out that “lack of resources” or the distance between the place of environmental damage and the place of prosecution frequently hamper the investigation. Eurojust consequently called for “a more systematic collection of intelligence” in the area of environmental criminality. To achieve this goal, space technologies provide particularly interesting assets. Recently the emergence and development of Earth Observation technologies (with resolution passing from meters to centimetres) have opened up new opportunities to support the investigation and the prosecution of environmental damage and crimes. This article (i) aims to outline the opportunities that now exist, by presenting different legal cases in which Earth observation data has been used as a source of evidence in legal proceedings. The different degrees of Earth Observation data probative value in each case are compared. It then (ii) questions the issues that can affect the admissibility of Earth Observation data with the objective of highlighting the need to clarify legal standards of admissibility and harmonise them at the international level.
