Criminal liability in the era of green technology and digital society: Towards a smart and sustainable legal system
Keywords:
Criminal liability, Eco-digital harm, Green technology, Digital governance, Environmental crimeAbstract
The rapid convergence of green technology and digital society has fundamentally transformed environmental governance. While digital infrastructures such as automated emissions monitoring systems, AI-driven compliance tools, and blockchain-based carbon markets enhance regulatory efficiency, they simultaneously generate new forms of eco-digital risk. These risks challenge the foundational assumptions of classical criminal liability, which remain anchored in individualized intent, direct causation, and territorially bounded jurisdiction. Existing scholarship has examined environmental harm through green criminology and technological wrongdoing through cyberlaw, yet these fields remain largely disconnected. As a result, criminal law lacks an integrated framework capable of addressing technologically mediated environmental harm. This article argues that eco-digital harm represents a structurally distinct category of wrongdoing characterized by distributed agency, algorithmic causation, and transnational digital interconnectivity. Employing a normative and comparative legal methodology, the study evaluates the doctrinal adequacy of existing liability principles and identifies structural gaps in attribution and enforcement mechanisms. The article advances a Hybrid Eco-Digital Liability Model that integrates expanded supervisory responsibility, functional causation standards, and technologically informed smart enforcement strategies. This model recalibrates classical doctrines without abandoning their normative foundations. By bridging green criminology and cyberlaw within a sustainability-oriented governance framework, the study contributes a unified conceptual approach to criminal liability in the era of digital environmental regulation. The findings highlight the urgent need for doctrinal evolution to preserve environmental integrity and regulatory legitimacy in technologically mediated societies.
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