The Use of New Technologies in Counteracting Violations of Environmental Legislation

The authors describe the experience of using information and other new technologies in the daily work of state law enforcement, nature protection agencies and other bodies involved in nature protection activities, including automated information systems, technical means of recording information, computer geoinformation systems that make it possible to monitor the condition of nature and nature-anthropogenic objects as part of control-supervision and other activities; they also make it possible to reveal, record and assess the consequences of violations of environmental legislation. The paper presents information on how procuratorial authorities, internal affair’s bodies and customs authorities use information technologies to solve the problems of identifying timber materials as they are transported on the territory of Russia and taken abroad, of controlling the legal origin of timber materials in customs reporting procedures and, in general, how these technologies are used to reduce the latency level of environmental offences. The authors claim that, in order to improve the nature protection law enforcement activities, it is necessary to use information technologies to organize a single accounting and analysis system for administrative offences in the environmental sphere, while taking into account the multi-subject nature of the bodies of administrative jurisdiction in this sphere and the existing difficulties in differentiating between environmental administrative offences and crimes. The authors discuss examples of using biotechnological and bioinformation methods to reveal the violations of environmental legislation and to repair the damage inflicted on the environment. They draw attention to the legislative embodiment of the duty, since 2019, for subjects of industrial environmental control to use new technologies in the form of distance monitoring over objects having a considerable negative impact on the environment. The authors also note a positive influence that the use of new technologies in Russia has on the activation of public environmental control thanks to, among other things, a federal information system of public control in the sphere of environmental protection. They suggest that there is a considerable anti-criminogenic potential in creating, at the regional level, internet-based information resources of environmental character to promote the cooperation between subjects of nature protection activities and improve the level of environmental culture of the Russian people.