For a long time, courts have often been seen as soft on polluters, hesitating to penalize environmental criminals harshly. Yet recently, it seems that enormous fines against corporations became increasingly common within the UK.
In March 2019, Severn Trent Water was fined £500,000 for spilling thousands of gallons of raw sewage during a Birmingham park. It was the newest during a series of pricy court appearances for water companies over the last half-decade. As a non-science mechanism, law and legislation function to control environmental problems by, among others, imposing punishment. This article studies the punishment for polluting water that imposed by the court towards the corporations. The observations are made to the penalty’s provisions of the Environmental Quality Act 1974, the main environmental statute in Malaysia, and penalties imposed by the court. The cases of water pollution are obtained from the records of the Department of Environment Malaysia for three years, from 2013 until 2015. The study found that there was a wide gap between the maximum punishment by law and penalties positioned by the court, and the corporations opted for fines. It is therefore suggested for a stiffer and more appropriate punishment imposed on the firms also as individuals behind it for effective implementation. It shouldn't just higher fine but imprisonment is often made possible in order that the law would function as an impact mechanism that will curb, shape, manage, and regulate the society.
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