Abstract
The environment include air, water land, plant and animal, their interrelationships and interdependent. The need to protect our environment has never been this urgent and our past lackadaisical attitude towards environmental concerns has resulted to massive and wanton environmental degradation leading to poor health development, and unaccountable deaths of human beings, plants and animals. Today, environmental challenges have assumed a treacherous dimension and this requires not only new legal framework and mechanism but adequate enforcement and prosecutorial powers. The existing legal and traditional regimes of law of tort – for tackling myriad environmental violations, have become obsolete and unattainable in dealing with even the established environmental cases and emerging environmental concerns such as soot, gas flaring, air pollution, hazardous and nuclear waste management. Most countries had employed both civil and criminal laws as weapon for dealing with environmental violation in addition to market-based mechanisms, including cooperation with potential environmental polluters, as ways out while some other countries still rely on the traditional common law approach, command and control legislative framework with their attendant regulatory setbacks. Nigeria falls within this latter trajectory and this approach poses great obstacles for regulators and enforces of our environmental legislation. This paper examines best practices for prosecuting environmental cases through criminal and civil, approaches. The paper will be jurisprudential in methodology, while evaluating the challenges in adopting litigious civil and criminal case; explaining their inadequacies in curbing or mitigating environmental violations in Nigeria. The paper found that civil and criminal approaches alone are not adequate given the new dimension of environmental challenges and the dynamics of environmental violators and that there are enough regulatory frameworks on the environment but sadly poorly framed and unattractive in ensuring compliance with environmental regulations. The paper thus concludes that there was the urgent need to expand the suit of regulatory and enforcement tools beyond civil cases and criminal prosecution of offenders, drawing from best practices and the recommendations made herein.
Keywords: Environmental Violations, Best Practices, Civil and Criminal cases/approaches