For the 4th time, in the Primorskaya State Academy of Agriculture, with the support of the Amur Tiger Center advanced training courses were conducted to identify violations of hunting and forestry legislation.
Systematic work to improve the skills of law enforcement officers of Primorye on the program “Basics of detecting environmental crimes, determining damage and compensating it” was launched in cooperation with the Primorskaya State Academy of Agriculturein 2013. During this time, certificates of the Institute for Advanced Studies and Retraining of “Primorskaya State Academy of Agriculture”, which is a state document on professional development, received more than 100 students.
This year, at the beginning of June, 24 employees received such training related to nature protection — investigators, investigators and officers of the Ministry of Internal Affairs for the Primorye — within five days. It is symbolic that the final certification and certificates for them were issued on June 5, on World Environment Day - Russian Ecologist Day.
“There are at least two points that we take into account when organizing refresher courses. In the Ministry of Internal Affairs there are no staff members who would specialize in investigating crimes against wildlife. However, such offenses are regularly recorded at almost every police station. In addition, environmental legislation is constantly being improved, changes are being made to the Criminal, Administrative Codes, and other regulatory and legal acts. Therefore, it is very important that in each district or administrative district in the tiger's area there should be at least one police officer who is well versed in all the intricacies of such offenses, and he would be able to consult his colleagues with expertise. And all together it would ensure the inevitability of punishment to people who dared to encroach on rare representatives of the richest flora and fauna of the Far East. During the courses, thanks to the lecturers, police officers were convinced that environmental crimes can be punished in a timely and severe manner,” comments Sergey Aramilev, director of the Amur Tiger Center.
Specialists from the Department of Hunting Surveillance of the Primorsky Krai, the Directorate for the Protection of Wildlife and Protected Natural Areas, the State Control Department of the Territory Department of Forestry, the Primorsky Interdistrict Environmental Prosecutor's Office, professors of the Primorskaya State Academy of Agriculture, the specialists of the Amur Tiger Center.
“The majority of both students and teachers of these courses confirmed the fact that the time of individual “black” lumberjacks has passed, and the main violations are now committed by organized groups under the guise of permits,” says Anatoly Kabanets. - That is why the main focus of the forest block this year was the topic “Peculiarities of detecting crimes as part of an organized criminal community committed during the designation and conduct of thinning, sanitary and others. Including those carried out within the framework of the fulfillment of state contracts for the implementation of a complex of works for the protection, preservation and reproduction of forests, with the simultaneous sale of forest plantations.” And it was read by investigators of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of the Russian Federation for the Khabarovsk Krai who participated in the uncovering of a number of high-profile crimes committed in the Vyazma district of the Khabarovsk Krai.”