The Attorney General’s Office (AGU) established a group of 27 lawyers who will work primarily on actions aimed at repairing environmental damage and punishing offenders. The idea is to expand the range of actions aimed at protecting Brazilian biomes.
The AGU-Recupera strategic group will have the task of adopting legal measures to protect Brazilian biomes and cultural heritage.
The team comprises 19 federal prosecutors and 8 Union lawyers, responsible for acting primarily in “causes of the Union, Ibama, ICMBio and Iphan that involve repairing environmental damage and punishing environmental offenders in the Amazon, Cerrado, Pantanal, Caatinga, Pampa and Atlantic Forest, in addition to also acting in processes that concern the Brazilian cultural heritage”.
Among the attributions foreseen for the AGU-Recupera are to judge and monitor the course of actions, prepare procedural documents, respond to citations and subpoenas, carry out dispatches, participate in hearings, carry out oral arguments and follow up on judgment sessions of relevant actions in environmental matters. and cultural heritage.
The proposition of measures and strategies to improve judicial performance in environmental matters; the articulation of legal consultancy activities between the Union, Ibama, ICMBio and Iphan, in particular for the provision of information that subsidize judicial action in cases involving the entities.
According to a note from the AGU, the group will have the attribution of improving the institutional articulation of the AGU with the bodies and entities of the public administration that formulate and execute environmental and cultural heritage policies; and to propose training initiatives in environmental matters to the AGU School.
It will be up to the team’s national coordination – exercised by the National Attorney for the Defense of the Climate and the Environment – to establish goals for the team and to present the results of the action every six months.
“The strategic group will also assume the attributions that until then were carried out by the Amazon Defense Task Force, which operated within the scope of the AGU between 2019 and 2022 and, in that period, filed a total of 247 actions to collect the payment of environmental fines and oblige environmental offenders to repair the damage caused”, detailed the AGU.
