Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

This paper presents the current state of the environmental criminal law in Chile. It begins with a critical assessment of the criminal offenses granting protection to the environment in our country. This will provide a framework to analyze the empirical data regarding the prosecution of these offenses during the last decade in Chile. Lastly, we will refer to high-profile cases. This work seeks to demonstrate the hypothesis that – despite recent legal modifications – there is no effective criminal environmental law in Chile.

The governance of environmental enforcement seeks to ensure that the processes of environmental evaluation, supervision and enforcement in the strict sense achieve the objective of compliance with the regulations and environmental commitments assumed by companies, thus generating the citizen benefit of ensuring a good quality of life and promoting responsible actions within the framework of sustainable development. As a result of the environmental emergency caused by the oil spill in the coastal area of the district of Ventanilla in Peru, the article evaluates whether the actions carried out by the Peruvian Environmental Evaluation and Enforcement Agency (OEFA, by its Spanish acronym) have the optimal conditions, according to the international framework, to achieve the objectives of an enforcement agency. To this end, three objectives are taken into account in the governance of environmental oversight: (i) to ensure that immediate measures are taken to address serious risks; (ii) to maintain sustained compliance with the law; and (iii) to ensure adequate prosecution of those who violate the rules. The case analysis discussed in the article allows us to examine a specific situation in detail and identify learned lessons, such as influencing the imposition of immediate measures in the face of serious risks, assessing the magnitude of the emergency, intervening with a focus on inter-institutional and inter-sectoral coordination, and prosecute those who violate legal norms; thereby, strengthening the governance of environmental enforcement in Peru.

The objective of this article is to analyze the implications of the biosphere reserve policy imposed by international law and adopted by Mexican Environmental Legislation on the local management of natural resources, especially water. The case study is about Cerro Grande, located in the Sierra de Manantlán Biosphere Reserve, in western Mexico, where, on one hand, local use of natural resources is limited, and on the other, water extraction for the city of Colima is made possible. For this review, three currents of environmental concern are considered: western environmentalism centered on conservation, environmental justice that strives for social equity, and Jorge Riechmann's proposal that promotes justice of the biosphere as an inter-species concern. The analysis shows that the policy of biosphere reserves is within the logic of western environmentalism, focusing on a conservationist and utilitarian vision of nature, dissociated from the human-social, and concludes that the policy of biosphere reserves is insufficient to solve the socio-environmental affectation of the dominant economic model, as it does not question the logical and territorial incoherence of the so-called sustainable development; Jorge Riechmann's proposal of environmental justice, as moderate biocentrism, is theoretically relevant, in search of an integral justice in Cerro Grande-Zacualpan beyond the conservationist environmentalism of the reserves.

This article studies the expiry and accreditation of Environmental Permits. It provides a review of the expiry of Environmental Permits, its normative consecration and its implementation by the Environmental Assessment Agency and the Superintendency of the Environment. Then, it raises ten legal-practical dilemmas around the expiry and accreditation of Environmental Permits. In particular, it examines questions of legality, legal certainty, means for contesting and administrative coordination. It highlights the lack of regulation under which projects remain once their implementation has been accredited; the absence of mechanisms that effectively force their continuity; and external situations that may affect their continuity. In this context, the work intends to approach the question of whether in the first ten years of application of the expiry of Environmental Permits, the aim that the legislator had in mind when including article 25 ter in Law No. 19300 is fulfilled: that projects are executed under similar baseline conditions to those considered in the environmental impact assessment procedure. This, it is argued, has not been sufficiently achieved. A series of regulatory adjustments are necessary, which are outlined throughout the study.

This study discusses the importance of including risk assessment within the process of free, prior and informed consultation and prior consent, within the bidding processes of industrial, mining or oil activities, and within indigenous territories in Ecuador. Spatial risk assessment is a support tool for decision making prior to any industrial activity in its territory. To achieve this objective, we use a logically deductive approach to create a legal and operational conceptual framework that follows the following steps: 1) Compilation of historical evidence of some legal cases brought within the Inter-American Human Rights System, between communities and governments in the region, 2) conceptualization of human rights vulnerabilities and their potential for environmental degradation during these human activities; 3) Introduce legislation to integrate environmental risk research into the free, prior and informed consultation, considering the possibility of looking for consensus when risks are considered high, in order to reduce and mitigate socio-environmental risks on these ancestral territories.

The objective of this study is to evaluate the situation of the courts and western legal science after the beginning of the collapse of the climatic equilibrium of the Holocene. The increasing intensity and frequency of extreme weather events indicate the collapse of the Holocene equilibrium. Such a collapse endangers the survival of the human species. With the onset of the Holocene equilibrium collapse, the concept of sustainable development, i.e., the bedrock of Western environmental law and interstate environmental law, has indisputably failed in the only aspect that matters, namely the prevention of the collapse. The most foundational task of the Western legal order is to safeguard the survival of the human species (Western anthropocentrism), because all human rights and responsibilities become inconsequential with the extinction of the human species. The collapse signifies that the foundation of the Occidental environmental law and interstate environmental law has been proven inadequate. The courts and the Occidental juridical science are thus confronted with the situation that they have to enforce the rule of law based on the Occidental legal order alone, because the legislatures have failed in their duty. The collapse also makes it necessary for the courts and the Occidental juridical science to accept the robust juridical systems of the Indigenous Nations of Ixachitlān (the Americas).

This article will explain how planned and perceived obsolescence generates technological waste, better known as e-waste, which largely contributes to climate change. Likewise, it will be studied how the right to repair technology can contribute to the reduction and reuse of technology, significantly reducing e-waste. Evidence will also be shown of how the right to compensation is becoming an alternative to fight the consequences that emanate from e-waste. The efforts of companies and governments that seek to combat these effects are addressed, such as the reconditioned technology that derives from recycling centers, which also turn out to be a lucrative business. Arguments against the right to repair, such as intellectual property, difficulty of repair, and user safety, will also be explained. In this sense, the legal frameworks of the European Community and the United States of America are explored, which are contrasted with those of Mexico and Latin American countries. In this way, it is concluded that, although we are facing an unfavorable scenario, current efforts point inthe right direction.

Both at the constitutional and legal levels, the Chilean system has only contemplated the human right to water from the reform introduced to the Water Code by Law 21,435, of 2022. This new right is incorporated into the legislation and, along with it, a series of legal mechanisms to make it effective. This article addresses the foundations on which the human right to water is based, its normative evolution in the international context, its jurisprudential recognition and finally its incorporation into current national law, in order to verify how this produces radical alterations in the principles of neutrality, proportionality and mandatory granting that supported the original Water Code.