Latency of Criminal Offences Against the Environment.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the latency of criminal offenses against the environment. It is noted that the presence of a high level of latency of the studied torts indicates: an unsatisfactory state of their registration; a decrease in the possibilities of applying measures of influence on such illegal acts; a significant violation of the principle of inevitability of punishment. It was found that the majority of the analyzed illegal acts have a predominantly medium and high level of latency, as well as a natural character. Typical among the specified criminal offenses are those related to environmental pollution, illegal extraction and circulation of minerals, illegal logging and circulation of forests. The main factors that determine the latency of criminal offenses against the environment are identified, namely: the absence of a clearly expressed injured party in the majority of such illegal acts; insufficient level of environmental awareness of the population, manifestations of civil indifference, low legal culture in the field of environmental protection, lack of an ecocentric type of thinking, underdevelopment of environmental ethics; distrust of law enforcement agencies and the court, which is due to the presence of corrupt connections among law enforcement officials and other state authorities; lack of an effective model of interaction between law enforcement, environmental protection and other competent state authorities; inadequate professional training of law enforcement officers, formal attitude to the performance of official duties, low level of internal discipline; commission of illegal acts mostly outside settlements; increased level of professionalism of environmental offenders; difficulty in establishing a causal relationship between environmentally dangerous acts and negative consequences that are socially dangerous; errors in the legal qualification of the act, made by both the victims themselves and the pre-trial investigation and court bodies. Key words: criminal offense, environment, latency, natural latency, artificial latency, adjacent latency, determination, factor, law enforcement agencies.