Juridinio asmens teisinė atsakomybė aplinkosaugos srityje: veiksmingumo problematika įgyvendinant darnaus vystymosi tikslus

Abstract

Industrial and other economic activity makes a big influence on environment and quite often such activity determines appearance of harm to nature. The legal entities the major activity aim of which is to seek profit become one of the principal sources of threat to environment. Legal entities striving towards organization activity aims use their economic, political and other social powers, so they are able to make a great negative or positive impact on the life of man, society and state. These objective causes determine the demand of effective legal regulation and environment protection and striving towards ensuring the coordinating of economic, social and environmental interests, i.e. realization of sustainable development aims becomes the priority direction of every state.
The implementation of sustainable development the essence of which are mutual harmony and compromise of three equal value environmental, economical and social society aims creates prerequisites not to let to entrench the primacy of economic aim in respect to other aims by the same not making absolute the environment and creating conditions for coexistence of aims of equal value. Insufficiently effective implementation of sustainable development aims creates legal ecological safety threat which encroaches both to the fundamental principle of legal safety able to ruin the basis of a legal state.
One of the measures able to ensure the implementation of sustainable development aims is the institute of legal entities legal liability in the environmental sphere and its effective application.
In Lithuania three sorts of legal entities legal liability can be applied – civil, criminal and administrative liability. But civil liability of legal entities in the environmental sphere is not the most effective legal liability sort aiming to implement aims of sustainable development. Aiming to ensure legal entities environmental law violations prevention the civil and environmental liability institute must be applied together with public liability, i.e. criminal and administrative liability institutes the major destination of which is the prevention of environmental law violations. However, the criminal liability institute of legal entities in the environmental sphere due to its strict character and hard consequences can be ineffective can be not effective aiming to keep the combinability of three different and contradicting each other aims. In the event of calling a legal entity for environmental crimes to criminal liability or consolidating by legal acts very strict criminal sanctions threat for economic and social aims appears, i.e. prerequisites for environmental aims to blanket two aims of society of equal value are created. Criminal liability of legal entities would be effective in the context of sustainable development only if criminal sanctions applied to legal entities will keep the balance between three different and contradicting each other aims.