Carole M. Billiet, Sandra Rousseau, Roel Meeus & Annelies Balcaen, Minnelijke schikkingen voor milieumisdrijven in Vlaanderen [Transactions for environmental offences in Flanders], Panopticon 2010/4, 78-84
The corner stone of the Environmental Lawforce research project is a database that documents the criminal and administrative sanctioning practice from the notice of violation to the execution of eventual sanctions. It includes empirical data on the public prosecutor’s ‘kitchen’: the use of opportunity dismissals, transaction offers and prosecution decision with regard to environmental offences. This article discusses the descriptive statistics concerning opportunity dismissals and transaction offers (data from 2005, gathered in the prosecution offices of Gent, Ieper and Kortrijk). It appears that opportunity dismissals are more used for natural persons than for legal persons, transaction offers more for legal persons than natural persons; that transaction offers mainly concern waste offences and environmental permitting offences (together more than 70% of all offers); and that transaction sums are extremely low (381 euro on average for legal person, 171 euro on average for natural persons).
Full publication (Dutch) here.