THE absence of a proper legal framework to specifically deal with environmental crimes has hindered the Environmental Management Agency (EMA)’s efforts to successfully ensure that the environment was protected, a Senate committee heard yesterday.
BY PHILLIP CHIDAVAENZI SENIOR REPORTER
EMA director Aaron Chigona told the Thematic Committee on the Millennium Development Goals that the country’s judiciary system was not treating environmental crimes with the seriousness they deserved.
“We have problems with the courts because cases are taking too long. Some of the sentences are also not stiff enough as someone can get off with community service. That is not good enough,” he said.
Chigona said they were pushing for the establishment of an environmental court so that criminal matters to do with the environment were dealt with expeditiously. He said it would be ideal for the country to introduce environmental levies and taxes to discourage offenders from deliberately polluting the environment.
“There is need for the establishment of environmental courts to ensure expeditious hearing of cases and to impose custodial sentences and prohibitive fines for environmental crimes,” he said.
“Environmental levies and taxes are needed to make pollution more expensive than complying with the law.”
He also stressed that it would be important to make miners pay levies so that there would be money for the detoxification of disused mines once they ceased operations as some closed mines around the country were still oozing out poisonous substances that killed cattle and posed a threat to human life.
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Chigona also told the committee that they recorded four veld fire fatalities in 2013 and although that was a decrease from 10 in 2009, 25 in 2010, five in 2011 and 16 in 2012, it was unacceptable that people should die as a result of veld fires.
He said the majority of the victims of the veld fires were the elderly, women and children and expressed concern that most of the fires were breaking out in resettlement areas.
