When judging illegal sand mining, STF says that environmental damage does not prescribe

When judging an Extraordinary Appeal from the Attorney General’s Office (AGU), last Monday (25), the ministers of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) unanimously reaffirmed the thesis that environmental crimes cannot be considered mere illicit acts civilians and, therefore, should not prescribe.

The trial took place as a result of a controversy brought before the Federal Court due to the illegal mining of sand on the banks of the Itajaí-açu river, in Santa Catarina.

Two companies were accused of causing environmental damage and ordered to recover the degraded area.

It turns out that, despite imposing the conviction for environmental damage, the Court denied the request for compensation made by the Union based on the illegal exploitation of minerals and collective moral damage.

According to the decision, compensation would not be possible, since the crime would have occurred more than five years ago and, in theory, would be time-barred.

In the Extraordinary Appeal presented to the STF, the AGU maintained that clandestine mineral extraction is a serious criminal conduct as it involves the “appropriation of non-renewable and finite assets”.

When accepting the AGU’s arguments, the president of the STF, minister Rosa Weber, stated that “the right to the environment is at the center of the international agenda and concerns formally inaugurated with the Stockholm Declaration and, as such, does not deserve to suffer temporal limits for your protection.”

The Supreme Court’s decision draws attention to the fact that the country does not yet have the same understanding of imprescriptibility, for example, for serious crimes such as corruption and money laundering.

It was only recently that the Senate’s Public Security Committee (CSP) approved a project that makes the crimes of active and passive corruption and money laundering imprescriptible (PL 5.236/2020).

The proposal, by senator Marcos do Val (Podemos-ES), is still awaiting analysis by the Constitution and Justice Commission (CCJ).