Forest Fire Criminal Investigation

INTERPOL's Participation in the Harmonization of Procedures

Abstract

From the perspective of fighting the emergency, forest fires have always received preferential attention from environmental managers based on extinction and the prevention of risky activities. However, perhaps due to being outside their normal work environment and due to the complexity of procedures and the need of highly specialized resources required, these environmental managers have historically paid insufficient attention to the criminal investigation of perpetrators in many places on the globe. The acceleration of climate change processes, however, is placing criminal investigation of forest fires as a growing need in some of these countries, making it increasingly necessary to create structures capable of responding to these needs. Not only to be able to know in more depth the motivations that give rise to the fires, so that effective prevention measures can be established, but also for the prosecution by the Justice and Law Enforcement Agencies of conducts contemplated as a crime in criminal regulations of the vast majority of countries on the planet. Either specifically as a crime of forest fire or as a crime of generic fire. In this regard, the efforts that INTERPOL has been developing in the last two years to contribute to harmonizing and promoting criminal investigation processes worldwide, and also to try to alleviate the difficulty of having training tools at an international level, are described in this study.