For the special issue on “Water Crime – Water Protection and Criminal Law” of Switzerland’s largest (online) legal journal, Jusletter, published on 1 June 2026, Stephan Sina, Senior Fellow at the Ecologic Institute, has written an article on the EU Environmental Criminal Law Directive as a potential key to a consistent prosecution of water crime. In it, he provides an overview of the key provisions of the Directive, with a focus on water protection offences, and examines, based on the planned implementation in Germany, the extent to which the Directive facilitates the prosecution of water crime. This is also of interest to Switzerland, as the Council of Europe Convention on the Protection of the Environment through Criminal Law, adopted in 2025, is modelled on the Directive.

This special issue of Jusletter presents selected papers from a conference held on 29 May 2026 at the University of Neuchâtel. It also marks the first publication of the „Wasserkriminalität" (Water Crime) research project at the Faculty of Law of the University of Neuchâtel, funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF), which examines the issue of water crime from an interdisciplinary perspective – legal, factual and criminological.