"The sanitation phase and organization of evidentiary activity in the collective process as an effective instrument for repairing damages in environmental litigation"
Collective Civil Procedure. Environmental litigation. Sanitation and organization phase. Effective repair. Probationary activity. Amazon biome.
The collective process must constitute an effective instrument for repairing environmental damage and, to this end, it must be processed with attention to the substantive law involved. Focusing on the sanitation and organization phase of the process, a retrospective and prospective approach is taken. In the first, the magistrate acts with the purpose of correctly identifying the demand and addressing possible preliminaries and defects. It decides issues such as establishing adequate competence and legitimacy and the need for participation of other interested parties. Aware of the peculiarities involving environmental damage given its multifaceted nature, there may be a need to make the so-called stabilization of demand more flexible, allowing some discussions to be revisited in the process. Once the controversial points of the dispute have been established, the parties are told which questions of fact and law they should work on, from a prospective perspective. The organization of the evidentiary activity is essential, with the analysis of the effects of time in the process, such as the imprescriptibility and inapplicability of the fait accompli theory to environmental law. The burden of proof will be distributed, analyzing the capacity and possibility of the parties to produce evidence, the complexity of the case, the existing scientific structure and the characteristics of the environmental asset. And in this context, public civil actions to combat deforestation in the Amazon Biome through Amazônia Protege deserved analysis, which represent significant progress in protecting the biome, but still need improvement, especially when it comes to the methodology for quantifying material damage and morals.