Restorative justice and environmental criminal law: A virtuous interplay

Taking as a frame the European legal space, the chapter aims at testing the following hypothesis: that restorative justice – its ideal of justice, values and methods – could help criminal law to improve how it traditionally reacts to the commission of an offense against the environment. In the case of environmental crimes, the synergy between restorative justice and criminal law works in two fundamental directions. On the one hand, restorative justice is useful for the correct understanding of the harm caused by the crime, which includes not only material elements (destruction or damage of natural resources), but also value elements (negative impacts on individual/community/environment relationships). On the other hand, restorative justice is worthwhile for effective harm repair, suitable to restore the environment both in an objective sense and in a value and relational sense. In order to reach such a conclusion, the analysis preliminarily focuses on the specificity of environmental protection implemented by criminal law in comparison with that provided by other sectors of the legal system; and on the environment as a value to be protected (also by criminal law) particularly with regard to the European Landscape Convention, the jurisprudence of the European Court of Human Rights and the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union.