Investigating the Scope of the Criminal Law of Green Crimes in Compliance with the Goals of Sustainable Development (SDG17)

Nowadays, new crimes involving the environment and natural resources are also referred to as green crimes. The main purpose of this paper is to identify and evaluate the scope of criminal law in this area in terms of sustainable development goals. The method of this research is content analysis. Initially, an attempt was made to give a general description of the subject by examining the types of such crimes and the environmental punishment approaches. After reviewing the statuary laws and previous researches, the initial findings are explained and analyzed to determine the scope of criminal law in the environment and natural resources and to find the relevant legal challenges. Consequently, the applicability of the criminal laws to the Sustainable Development Goals has been examined. It is concluded that although the environmental criminal law in terms of the diversity of laws, has been generally able to cover relevant issues, because of multiplicity of regulatory policies, lack of an appropriate enforcement mechanism on the one hand and failure to resolve some legal uncertainties such as unnecessary dependency of environmental crimes on their results on the other hand, it has not been successful to fully achieve the goals of sustainable development. Therefore, the success of criminal law in protecting the environment requires complementary and effective measures, including determining an appropriate approach to environmental punishment, recognizing criminal liability for legal entities violating environmental laws, and establishing and strengthening modern and advanced regulatory bodies.