Legitimidad y contenido de la intervención penal en materia de residuos

Résumé

Irregular waste management activities seriously endanger the environment. Faced with this reality, European Union institutions urged Member States to criminalise various conducts related to waste management through Directive 2008/99/EC. As a result of its transposition into Spanish law, article 326 of the Criminal Code contains two different crimes: the crime of illegal waste management and the crime of illegal waste shipment. This area of environmental criminality has been traditionally forgotten by Spanish criminal doctrine. Therefore, this doctoral thesis addresses this issue in two different parts. Firstly, it analyses the legitimacy of criminal intervention in the field of waste. To do this, Part I analyses the procedural conception of the legally-protected right, from which we study the moral, political and instrumental justification of coercive legal intervention. Part II offers a legal-dogmatic analysis of the offences criminalised in article 326 of the Criminal Code seeking an interpretation that reconciles effective environmental protection and respect for criminal guarantees.