Criminal legal protection of water bodies: national, foreign and international experience

Current issues related to the legal protection of water bodies, ensuring their increasing value in modern conditions, are revealed. The issues of legal protection under consideration are relevant both at the international and domestic levels. The purpose of the study is to consider the negative impact of the weakening of the administrative regime in the field of environmental protection, which affects the application of measures of criminal law and procedural coercion against those responsible for causing significant harm to natural resources. Administrative law is closely related to criminal law; therefore, in practice, administrative penalties prevent damage to the objects of encroachment (public relations in the field of rational use of natural resources), which can develop into a socially dangerous consequence of the crime. General scientific and specifically legal methods are used as research methods. The main attention is paid to the method of analysis. It is established that the creation of a unified basic methodology that would help investigative and inquiry authorities increase the percentage of detection of criminal and administrative cases of environmental crimes is currently not possible. The intersectoral nature and blanket nature of the norms significantly distinguish such acts from each other. The lack of professional training of investigators and interrogators, the lack of knowledge and special literature on the investigation of environmental crimes, of course, cannot have a positive effect on curbing crime in this area.