The protection of the environment from the perspective of the Court of Justice of Minas Gerais

Abstract

The social evolution cumulated to the complex and growing needs of the human race end up increasing in an increasingly significant way the exploration to the environment where it is inserted. Environmental Law, consisting of principles and rules, emerges as a regulatory instrument of human action on the environment. The paper analyzes the performance of the TJMG - Court of Justice of Minas Gerais - in the ambit of Environmental Law, as a focus on the application of the principiological panorama in its judgments, to verify the most present values ​​in the jurisprudence of the Mining Court. The research used the jurisprudential search system available on the TJMG's virtual site, which allows extensive filtering and establishment of search criteria. Each principle recognized by the doctrine was searched in isolation for quantitative verification of its mention by the TJMG in the last five years (2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and 2018). In all, the principles were cited in 3014 times, the 'environmentally balanced environment' being the most mentioned (1290 citations), followed by the principles of 'prevention' (533 citations), 'precaution' (353 citations), 'development sustainable '(302 citations) and the' polluter pays' (287 citations). On the other hand, some principles were not mentioned by the Court, such as the 'protector-recipient' and the 'consideration of the environmental variable in the development policy decision-making process'. From 2014 to 2018 there was a 14.07% increase in the citation to environmental principles by the TJMG (540 in 2014, 616 in 2018), with 2017 being the year with the highest princiological presence in the trials (656 citations), followed by 2016 (643 citations), and 2018 (616 citations).