21 June 2023 – Tirana
EU4LEA organized a comprehensive and inter-institutional workshop, for all stakeholders on investigating and prosecuting environmental crimes. The main focus being to capacity building in terms of investigation and prosecution, the Workshop encompassed relevant legal frameworks in Albania, Italy and EU and was actively discussed by the participants. It emerged that environmental crime must be read as a form of economic crime and be fought through the prosecution of various criminal activities, ranging from organized crime, corruption to fraud in public procurement. The agreed approach discussed by the participants, and EU4LEA future assistance, was that Albania LEA, Environmental protection agencies, JA, shall have an initial strategic vision of the phenomenon and then build technical capacities to better understand environmental crime as a crime through which a goal is achieved, such as illegal profit, and especially corruption, bribery, etc.
