Katinka De Clercq, Het beboetingsbeleid van de Afdeling Milieuhandhaving, Milieuschade en Crisisbeheer met betrekking tot de prioritaire dossiers inzake milieubeheerrecht (masterproef Master in de Rechten), Lawforce working paper 2017/1, 125 p.
The paper explores the sanctioning policy of the AMMC, the Flemish administration competent to punish environmental offences. It focusses on the AMMC’s administrative fining practice, eventually including forfeiture of illegal benefits, and on its use of transaction offers with regard to biodiversity offences. Unpublished source material was gathered with the AMMC. More specifically, the research analyses ca. 100 unpublished decisions made between 1st of January 2015 and 30 June 2016, sanctioning biodiversity offences considered to be serious enough to be labeled as ‘priority’ offences. When deciding about fine levels, the administration uses decision trees to guarantee a similar fining of similar offences.
Full paper (Dutch) here