Criminal legal means of ensuring environmental safety

The article addresses the problem of ensuring environmental safety by criminal law means. By comparing the texts of legal acts that established criminal responsibility for environmental crimes throughout the entire history of domestic criminal law, the degree of regulation of public relations in the field of protecting the natural environment from criminal encroachment in different periods is determined. The article considers the norms of modern criminal legislation on liability for environmental crimes; on the basis of statistics, this Judicial Department at the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation analyzes the effectiveness of the legal norms containing individual components of environmental crimes. On the example of the analysis of judicial practice in cases of illegal logging of forest plantations, the shortcomings of the existing legal norms are revealed, and a proposal is made to improve them.